Fun At The 2011 Concours d’Lemons
It has been a long day here in Monterey. The weather has been great and we are starting to feel automotive overload. Heck, there are Rolls Royces and Ferrari 458s at every corner. We have attempted to attend every car show and auction that our bodies will allow and it has been everything we expected and more. Even with so many high dollar cars around, one of the highlights of our trip has been the Concours d’Lemons.
This event is unlike anything else you will find on the Peninsula this week. The cars were not high dollar, but everyone had a smile on their face. It was free to get in so the attendance was great and it gave us a chance to meet many interesting people. Wayne Carini from the TV show Chasing Classic Cars even showed up with an old VW bus.
We have never laughed this much at a car show. Who would have known that it could be so much fun to make of the blunders made in the automotive industry. Eagles, Pintos, and Pacers have never been so much as they were today. This orange Pinto won the best Pinto award. The just had to make sure noone rear ended them to avoid going up in flames.
This Studebaker won the most dangerous car award and for good reason. This beast has two engines mounted one right behind the other. The drivers seat had to be mounted at an angle to get it to fit. Best part was that one of the supercharged engines was a Chevy and the other was a Hemi. When the owner was asked why he did that, he said that he just used what ever was lying around the shop at the time.
Finally, we have our POS Worst of Show winner: a Cimarron by Caddilac. This car was so bad that Cadilac didnt even want to call it a Cadilac. This particular example had all the options available including some gold trim and a Rolls Royce grill. These were terrible cars and the Cimarron was even nominated as one of Times Magazine’s 50 Worst Cars of All Time. This event was all about having a good time and it was a stark contrast to Pebble Beach tomorrow. We are excited to see the best of the best tomorrow, but we doubt we will laugh as much as we did today.
Comments
Nice to see Cadillac taking another LeMons award home. That Cimarron looks like a sweet ride…
but i does not have the cornering lights….. i had a burnt orange cadidilaver with brown leather, sunroof, cassette player with the bose speaker system, and cornering lights ….most aweful car I have ever owned.. it spewed oil from everywhere, from the day it rolled off the floor of roth cadillac.. overheated…. powers seats didnt work… drivers door fell off when it was only 6 months old .. hinges broke off because the door was too heavy ….OH how i remember that car… sadly GM carried on that tradition on all their products for next 20 years …. gave them another chance in 04 and bought 2… both junk …now driving a new subaru legacy… finest car i have had in the last 15 years
oh BTW when i did put the turn signals on ….. the windsheild wipers would go on wild … but only when i turned left
I even saw one with Cadillac spelled the way you wrote it …
That is actually a later model Cimarron, with the 2.8 V-6. The earlier ones were even worse, with quad headlights and the 1.8 four-cylinder engine. I can just hear the thinking back then. “Hey, we turned the Nova into the Seville back in ’75 and it was a big hit. This will be just as good!”
The Seville, by contrast, was a phenomenal car, and really only shared the cowl and windshield with the Nova platform, so it turned out a lot better than the Cimarron
I think GM had a bunch of excess parts laying around and decided to put together a “working man’s” Cadillac and created the Cimarron. They took a Cavalier body and frame, Buick headlights, had some rejected tail lights that they decided to make a new car instead of trying to fix the non-conformity, and a pish posh of other parts and threw them together to make this car. It was nothing more than a glorified Cavalier. I am sure it didn’t ride any better, sound any better, or perform any better than a Cavalier. Just because you put a badge of Cadillac on a car doesn’t make it one. For the record, I think one of the worst cars ever made was the Chevrolet Citation/Pontiac Phoenix from 1981 to 85 I think is the years they made them. My dad bought an 81 Phoenix and it was junk from the get go. It was his first new car but it was not much better than a worn out used car. It threw off alternator belts every 5,000 to 20,000 miles. The 2.5 inline four cylinder was a joke. Pop swore that it was wrecked before he owned it, but it only had a few miles on it when he got it. He might be right though because only certain brands of alternator belts would go on it as the gap between the shock tower and the alternator was minuscule. Dad bought another new car Monte Carlo SS in 87 and I got to drive the 81 Pontiac some in high school when my 72 Monte Carlo wasn’t running as it was worn (and rusted out) out too when I got it. The last trip the Phoenix ever made was in 1988 when I went to Indianapolis for the Super Chevy Sunday. After I made it back, it spun the alternator belt and pop parked it ever since with only 88,000 miles on it. It is still sitting in the woods on the family farm.The highlight, or at least it would have been my highlight, was when I was going to get to drive the 87 SS to prom. I wrecked the Phoenix in a fender bender my Junior year in 87 and he wouldn’t let me drive the SS to prom. The next year about two weeks before prom, HE wrecked the SS when someone ran a red light and creamed it. When I got home, everyone was sitting around outside and someone said dad wrecked the car. Being the motorhead I was, the first thing I asked was, “How bad was the car hurt?”
It was indeed a fun show, and not just for the chance to mock automotive histories low-lights, but to share the fun people were having with these quirky cars. Really nice people with their lovable little cars = best car show in the world.That said, the 1951 Tatra was by far best in show.
Sorry but that Cimarron doesn’t have all the options. It doesn’t have the optional two tone paint. I used to have either an ’87 or ’88 with all the options, including the two tone paint. The 2.8 v6 in them had no limiter in the computer ( like the other GM cars) and were actually pretty fast. How fast? I was a police officer back then and took it on the interstate against two ’94 Crown Vic Police Cruisers with the 4.8 v8s. Passed them at 130.