Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Pebble Beach 2025: Winner, The "Tulipwood" Hispano-Suiza

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Pebble Beach 2025: Winner, The "Tulipwood" Hispano-Suiza · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into a fairly inept
• 0:07
  sports bike rider hailing from California.
• 0:10
  He collects cars and bikes built with plenty of cheap and
• 0:12
  fast and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars driving motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
• 0:32
  Good day.
• 0:33
  Good morning, good afternoon.
• 0:35
  It is John Summers, the Motoring historian brief vignette.
• 0:38
  This one, just wanting to offer a little overview on this year's
• 0:44
  Pebble Beach Concor winner.
• 0:46
  The Hispano swr.
• 0:47
  Tulipwood.
• 0:49
  Gonna open with a confession.
• 0:50
  Saw the car on the field.
• 0:52
  Didn't recognize it.
• 0:54
  Didn't recognize it as a winner.
• 0:56
  Didn't recognize the fact that I know the car.
• 1:00
  So let's talk a little bit about that and and why the car won.
• 1:04
  So it's a 1924.
• 1:06
  It was commissioned by a guy called Andre Dubnet.
• 1:10
  I don't know what kind of a drink it is.
• 1:12
  I guess it was bigger years ago in France.
• 1:14
  It's like an after dinner kind of dubnet cognac.
• 1:17
  If you're the pebble beaches, they know it like it was Budweiser or or PBR.
• 1:23
  Or, or ley bitter if you're from Northern England kind of thing.
• 1:26
  But it's not quite, I mean, so, so Dubnet commissioned it, I guess Dubnet
• 1:30
  background was, he was a fighter pilot in the First World War and
• 1:36
  those early aircraft, it was all about being able to fly higher and longer.
• 1:42
  Than anyone else.
• 1:43
  So it was all about whose engine was best.
• 1:45
  And the guys that built those engines were BMW.
• 1:49
  There was Rolls Royce, there was Damer Benz, and there was his Spano Swer.
• 1:54
  And the guy that worked for his Spano Swer, the key
• 1:58
  figure is this guy, mark ett.
• 2:01
  So the company is one of these companies a bit like Bugatti, where it was based
• 2:05
  in one country, but the founder was somewhere else and 'cause of the war
• 2:09
  and revolution and, and all of that.
• 2:11
  And the company survives now the stork motif that is his spano Suza that survives
• 2:17
  today making high quality machine tools.
• 2:21
  So Berg, it was Swiss, but they set up in Spain or something like that.
• 2:25
  And I, I don't know where the French connection came in.
• 2:27
  It may have been Dubnet money, but the point here is that Dubnet used wealth
• 2:32
  from the booze to go most racing after the excitement of being a fighter pilot in the
• 2:39
  first World War, it ended and obviously, what were you gonna build the car out of?
• 2:43
  Well, the best bloody engine.
• 2:45
  From the plains, right?
• 2:46
  So that was his baro, SWER, and Burke.
• 2:49
  And you know, since we well know that for every 10 pounds you
• 2:52
  save, you gain a horsepower.
• 2:54
  The thought was that they would build the car out of wood, tulip
• 2:58
  wood, you say, well, actually no.
• 3:00
  It just sort of looked that color and that's what people call it now.
• 3:04
  This is a very important detail on the car because I learned just today reading
• 3:09
  about it that it was actually mahogany.
• 3:12
  That the car was made from.
• 3:14
  I mean, the point is right, the, the body weighs 160 pounds, so Dubnet
• 3:20
  races finishes reasonably well.
• 3:22
  I want to say fourth, I've not done my preparation, but finishes
• 3:25
  fourth in the 1924 Target, Florio.
• 3:28
  Now if you know anything about the target florio, you'll know that, you
• 3:31
  know, I mean, I drove the course in an Alpha 1 4 7 rental car, and it
• 3:36
  was all second and third gear stuff.
• 3:38
  So how you got on in a car that had the same wheel base as like a speed
• 3:43
  six Bentley, like how that was many get on on the mountains of Sicily.
• 3:48
  I'm not really sure, but it did do reasonably well.
• 3:50
  I, as I say, I, I, I wanna say it finished fourth.
• 3:53
  Now I have.
• 3:55
  Rodney W's book on the tag Florio.
• 3:59
  He was a writer for the Motorist and he wrote a book about the tag Florio
• 4:03
  years ago, and in that book, there is a picture of the car competing in the event.
• 4:07
  Now, for me, at the time when I saw that photo, when I first got the
• 4:11
  book, it was stunning to me because you see, I met the tulip wood.
• 4:16
  In 2000, and I would say six, 2007, when I first visited the Black Hawk
• 4:23
  Museum in California, now the Black Hawk Museum was put together by a guy
• 4:28
  called Don Williams and another guy.
• 4:32
  Ken Baring, I can't remember how Ken made his money, but Ken was friends with Don,
• 4:38
  and Don helped Ken collect the right kind of cars, and, and Don was very, very well
• 4:44
  known within the Pebble Beach community.
• 4:47
  But what Don did was what they did in the eighties, what Bill Har.
• 4:52
  Did and, and what these West coast guys did, which was they, they took cars that
• 4:57
  nobody cared about that were derelict and they restored them, but they restored them
• 5:02
  to be the best that they could possibly be, so that in that car show at Pebble
• 5:07
  Beach, they could win best in show.
• 5:09
  So that meant consulting their wives often about what color combination was best.
• 5:14
  You didn't worry about authenticity.
• 5:16
  It meant that.
• 5:17
  If originally a normal steel screw had been used, but now you
• 5:23
  could use a chrome one or a bronze one and it might look better.
• 5:26
  Well, that's what you did.
• 5:28
  In other words, it was about making the cars look great rather than about
• 5:32
  making the cars authentically correct.
• 5:35
  So I'm gonna include a picture of the tulip wood as it originally was.
• 5:40
  In fact, I may even use it as the thumbnail as it was in 2008 when I found
• 5:45
  it, certainly not as it originally was.
• 5:48
  Let's make that clear as it was in 2008, when it was in the Black Hawk Museum,
• 5:53
  2000, you know, early two thousands, it had gold wheels, it had those fenders,
• 5:58
  trailing fenders put on the end of it.
• 6:01
  Put on the end of the fenders.
• 6:02
  And actually, if you looked at the car under the lights of the Black Hawk,
• 6:06
  the body actually looked less bright than the fenders and those gold wheels.
• 6:13
  Now the whole thing about the Black Hawk was that one
• 6:16
  evening in Geneva after dinner.
• 6:19
  Ken Baring and Don Williams were walking together.
• 6:22
  It was the eighties.
• 6:23
  They were talking about cars.
• 6:25
  And if you've ever been to Geneva, you'll know that there's the fountain
• 6:28
  in the center of town and after you've had the fondue, you want to
• 6:31
  like walk a little bit and there's Porsches on the street to look out,
• 6:34
  but there's also shops with watches in.
• 6:36
  So they were looking in the window with watches and they were
• 6:38
  talking about the watches, and they were amusing at the idea.
• 6:41
  Could you display cars like jewelry?
• 6:44
  And they came up with a notion that you could build a museum that was like that.
• 6:48
  So the Black Hawk is all this black marble and the cars jump off this black marble.
• 6:54
  Pretty impressive concepts.
• 6:55
  Now, for us docents, it was kind of annoying because we like to do
• 6:59
  things like if you add a car from the 1890s, you like to show, you
• 7:02
  know, the manic Kidd with the dress.
• 7:04
  And that really made it come alive for the school kids.
• 7:07
  And that definitely wasn't.
• 7:09
  Ken and Don's mantra of the car, like a piece of jewelry twinkling
• 7:14
  in the window of a Geneva jewelry shop like it was a Breitling or a a
• 7:19
  Patite Philippe, if I pronounced that correctly, which I probably haven't.
• 7:22
  So this is the ethos of the his Spana Swer.
• 7:30
  Tulip wood.
• 7:30
  It's not really tulip wood, it's a fighter pilot's racing car.
• 7:34
  But how serious was as a racing car, who really knows?
• 7:38
  I mean, I, I, well, I've not dug into the history of it.
• 7:40
  Maybe you know the pebble description would have it, but
• 7:43
  the point is that in the 1980s.
• 7:46
  The way the Tule wood was, was in hearts.
• 7:49
  I don't think Don did it.
• 7:50
  I think some other guy did it in the sixties or the seventies.
• 7:54
  But the, the point is that the car was gussied up.
• 7:56
  It was made to look in the eyes of the Don Williams era.
• 8:00
  People better than original.
• 8:04
  So the car that won Pebble Beach and the car that you'll be familiar with
• 8:08
  had black wheels and it had nothing.
• 8:11
  No crazy trailing fenders did it?
• 8:13
  It just had the torpedo body.
• 8:15
  And that prompted me to want to do this pot because I actually believe the car
• 8:21
  was more elegant in the form that I saw it in, in the Black Hawk, in the form
• 8:26
  that I saw it in, in the Black Hawk with the bright lights and the gold
• 8:30
  wheels and the fenders and elevated it.
• 8:34
  It was as the, I read a quote where the owner had said, when I acquired
• 8:37
  the car, it was a piece of furniture.
• 8:39
  It was, it was a piece of furniture.
• 8:42
  Are you kidding me?
• 8:42
  Now it's like a car.
• 8:44
  Is he gonna take it to the Monterey Historics and race it next year
• 8:47
  alongside the Ragtime Races?
• 8:49
  No, he is not.
• 8:50
  It's a piece of furniture now, except now it doesn't have the fenders
• 8:54
  and the gold wheels, and it's.
• 8:57
  It's less Shazam for sure.
• 8:59
  Is it less elegant?
• 9:00
  You might argue it's more elegant.
• 9:01
  It's more original looking now, but you know, in the pod that we recorded
• 9:06
  earlier today, Ollie and I, Ollie amusingly used a parallel between
• 9:10
  a pebble car and the Fox Mustang.
• 9:13
  And he said, you know, if I take the pony wheels off and if I put American
• 9:16
  racing wheels on the car is more elegant 'cause it looks better, but it's less
• 9:20
  elegant 'cause it's less original.
• 9:22
  So which is it?
• 9:23
  Well, it's a great point, isn't it?
• 9:25
  And it's a point which pervades directly to this car 'cause it
• 9:28
  looked better with the gold wheels.
• 9:29
  I rarely agree with Don Williams.
• 9:32
  Don Williams once stood up at the Blackhawk Museum and talked
• 9:34
  about how he liked shiny cars and how he didn't like crap.
• 9:38
  And I've always, ever since then thought to myself, well, Don, I love.
• 9:43
  Crap.
• 9:43
  I can't consistently collect crap, partly because that's
• 9:47
  what nobody else wants to do.
• 9:48
  I don't need it to be shiny or glossy.
• 9:50
  I like it to be grubby and used and have the story.
• 9:53
  And if you've listened to my pods, you already know that about collector cars.
• 9:57
  So what an interesting anecdote in and around that show winning Hispano Swer.
• 10:03
  So just to wrap up, there are a couple of other cars on the
• 10:06
  show field that really do.
• 10:09
  Deserve every car deserves some attention.
• 10:11
  There are a couple more that I really wanna draw attention to.
• 10:14
  Firstly, a pair of jaguars that were in the post-war preservation class.
• 10:18
  The first was a sea type racer that has a contiguous history, original paint.
• 10:23
  It was just a flat out, lovely, lovely old car.
• 10:28
  Like when do you see an original racing car?
• 10:31
  And this had a beautiful.
• 10:33
  Patina on it.
• 10:34
  It was kind of a metallic blue JSU, but plate on it.
• 10:37
  Lovely.
• 10:38
  The other one was, uh, an XK one 20, which had been sold new in la,
• 10:43
  driven to San Francisco, stored, taken outta storage, driven another 600
• 10:49
  miles, and then put back in storage.
• 10:52
  The car had 1,043 miles original.
• 10:56
  Well, he was like, but what would you do with it?
• 10:58
  It's like, it's like a hearing yourself, speak back.
• 11:00
  'cause I'm like, I don't know.
• 11:02
  What would you do with it?
• 11:03
  I mean, look at it.
• 11:03
  It's all you could do, isn't it?
• 11:05
  I mean, it's awesome.
• 11:06
  The smell and the whole like, I mean, after you've brought it to
• 11:09
  Pebble Beach, what do you do with it?
• 11:10
  You can't drive it.
• 11:11
  You can't even change the tires without like hurting.
• 11:14
  What makes it special?
• 11:15
  Like it's special.
• 11:16
  'cause nothing's ever happened to it.
• 11:18
  It's that truly is a piece of furniture, isn't it?
• 11:21
  There was, uh, a Cobra class as well.
• 11:24
  It was.
• 11:24
  Big block cars.
• 11:26
  It was like SC cars or something, like exactly what the, the designation was.
• 11:30
  But it was lovely to look at that with, uh, one of my docent colleagues,
• 11:34
  or the guy who has been a docent with me in the past, one of the cobras on
• 11:38
  the field he prepared in his shop.
• 11:41
  So looking at.
• 11:44
  Cobras with somebody who basically has the skillset to be a pebble judge.
• 11:49
  Oh, that is really very pleasing as well.
• 11:52
  And that is, of course, experience.
• 11:55
  It's a very special thank you.
• 11:56
  Drive through.
• 12:07
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• 12:11
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• 12:12
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• 12:16
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• 12:34
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• 12:36
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• 12:40
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• 12:42
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• 12:45
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