Car Advice: What’s the Concours d’LeMons?

It was created by Alan Galbraith in California as a reaction to those wonderful but increasingly snooty events celebrating automotive perfection, such as the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance.

Galbraith's first foray was held in 2009 under the slogan "Concours d'LeMons: celebrating the Oddball, Mundane and truly Awful of the automotive world."

The random capitals seem completely in keeping with an event for good examples of dreadful cars, and vice versa.

Galbraith told us while attending Pebble Beach a few years ago he dreamed of parking a rusty Ford Pinto on the perfectly kept lawn between the Bugattis and Duesenbergs. His solution was to hold his event nearby, and on the day before.

"We wanted fun, to let a little air out of the Pebble Beach balloon. It was pretty well a hit from the word go. Now a fair share of people who are showing [ultra expensive] cars at Pebble Beach on Sunday, they will also bring a car for our show on Saturday."

The original was to be a one-off but there are now three a year in the US (Michigan, California and Georgia) and one in the UK, renamed "The Festival of the Unexceptional" as the meaning of "lemon" doesn't quite line up in Old Blighty.

Galbraith says he's in negotiations to run an Australian Concours d'LeMons in conjunction with a vintage car rally.

Crowds in the US are on the rise, which Galbraith attributes to the lack of an entry fee. "It's free to get in, and I tell people you get what you pay for."

The premier trophy is "Worst in Show". Winners have included a loathsome Pontiac Aztek with all the original accessories including a pop-up tent, a laughable Cadillac Cimarron from the 1980s (essentially a blingy Camira), and a ghastly Spanish-made Voisin Biscuter.

"Not sure if you know that last one but it is a horrible two-stroke, completely dangerous," says Galbraith. 

"The steering column is basically a sharpened steel rod pointed straight at your throat. It's really a clunker, and just the kind of thing we appreciate."

Lesser prizes along national lines include: Rueful Britannia, Unmitigated Gaul, Der SelfSatisfiedKrauttenWagen, Needlessly Complex Italian, Soul Sucking Japanese Appliance, Rust Belt American Junk, Swedish Meatball and Kommunist Kar.

A personal favourite of Galbraith's is the Facel Vega Facellia, "a lovely car with an engine with the durability of a potato chip." Its major citric achievement was to possess enough flaws to sink the company that built it.

The most recent Detroit fixture featured a Chevrolet Corvair – the car branded by Ralph Nader as "Unsafe at any Speed" – wearing Holden badges. If you ask why, you're probably never going to get into the spirit of this eccentric event.