The Amelia Turns 30: Six Honorees Wish It a Happy Birthday

“An Unmatched Tradition of Automotive Excellence Since 1950,” is how the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance describes itself on its website. And who would argue with that?

Undeniably, the Pebble Beach Concours—held each August on the 18th fairway of the 106-year-old Pebble Beach Golf Links, which abuts California’s Carmel Bay on one side, the ultra-exclusive Lodge at Pebble Beach on the other—has become the world’s premiere celebration of the automobile. It says that on the website, too.

Meanwhile, 2349 miles east of Pebble Beach, and 46 years after its Concours began, a geographical realization descended upon two men who would make a little barrier island north of Jacksonville, Florida, very nearly as famous in the automotive world as Pebble had become.

The general manager of the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island, Michael Carsch, who coincidentally served as president of the area chamber of commerce, contacted Jacksonville businessman, racer, and car collector Bill Warner, who wrote and photographed stories for Road & Track magazine in his spare time. Carsch, who died in 2019, and Warner reasoned that they had access to an ultra-exclusive, 446-room hotel adjacent to the sea-grass-and-sand-dune-lined Atlantic Ocean on one side, the championship-level, 18-hole Golf Club of Amelia Island on the other.

If that sounds like a potential location for an East Coast version of the Pebble Beach Concours, then you get it.

On April 6, 1996, a misty Saturday, the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance was born on the 10th fairway of the Golf Club, and it hit the ground running. Warner phoned friends, called in favors and generally pestered collectors to lend him their cars, some worth seven figures or more. And they did.

The first Amelia Concours had over 150 cars on display, an utterly diverse selection ranging from “Big Daddy” Don Garlits’ Swamp Rat III dragster, built in 1960, to a race-winning Mercedes-Benz W196 R Stromlinienwagen Formula 1 car driven by Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss in 1955, which incidentally sold at auction in Germany last month for $53 million.

And to sweeten the pot for attendees of that first Amelia Concours, Warner dished up Don Garlits and Stirling Moss as guests. Moss was, incidentally, the event’s first official honoree, an annual tradition that continues. How did he snag Moss, the winner of 16 F1 races and the Mille Miglia, and Garlits, who won 17 drag-racing championships, mostly in cars he designed and built, to appear at an event no one had heard of?

Sponsor Mercedes-Benz helped Warner get a commitment from Moss, but Garlits was on the fence until Warner told him Moss was all in. “Stirling Moss is coming?” Garlits said. “I’ve always wanted to meet that guy!” And Moss and Garlits, racing’s odd couple, had a long and enthusiastic after-dinner conversation about motorsports. “It was like it was just those two in the room,” Warner recalled. Oh, to have been at that table.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The focus of this story is about the earlier years of the Amelia Island Concours as told by some of those annual honorees who spoke at a seminar held March 9 at the 2025 event, now just called The Amelia, one of the few changes Hagerty made after purchasing the rights to the show in 2021. Hagerty has continued the charitable aspect of The Amelia, which has generated over $4 million in donations to the Community Hospice & Palliative Care, Spina Bifida of Jacksonville, and others.

And Hagerty has also continued Warner’s policy of naming an honoree each year, always someone in motorsports, because Warner figured it was a good way to meet his heroes. Those honorees present at the seminar:

—David Hobbs, 85, Formula 1 racer for McLaren, Honda, and BRM, a 24 Hours of Le Mans competitor for two decades, turned TV commentator.

—Lyn St. James, 78, Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year, two-time class winner at the Rolex 24 at Daytona and a Le Mans competitor.

—Bobby Rahal, 72, three-time IndyCar champion and three-time Indy 500 winner (once as a driver, twice as a team owner).

—Hurley Haywood, 76, five-time Rolex 24 winner and three-time Le Mans winner.

—Derek Bell, 83, five-time Le Mans winner, and a factory F1 driver for Ferrari and McLaren, turned TV commentator.

—Helio Castroneves, 49, four-time Indy 500 winner, three-time Rolex 24 winner, Dancing with the Stars champion, and Amelia’s 2025 honoree.

They were joined onstage by Amelia founder Warner, and moderator Ray Evernham, a car collector, vintage racer, former NASCAR team owner, and crew chief for four-time NASCAR champ Jeff Gordon, the 2023 honoree.

As Bill Warner doesn’t mind saying, some honorees were a little more difficult to wrangle than others. One comes to mind, back in 2004: “Mercedes-Benz was a major sponsor. They had a big table up front. Bobby Unser is there—I’m not going to tell you the whole thing, because it’s terrible—but Bobby gets up and says, ‘You know, I used to race for Audi.’ The Mercedes people were just looking at him, wondering what was coming next. ‘I learned one thing when I was racing for Audi—I learned that Germans hate Americans!’ And I thought, ‘Well, there goes one sponsor!'”

Amelia, since the beginning, has been known as the racer’s concours, spotlighting an outsize number of cars and people from motorsports. And that’s been one of the really successful aspects of the show, Warner said. “We bring such a wide variety of racers together. They race at different venues, and they know of each other, but they never get a chance to meet. And we give them an opportunity here to meet their heroes. To have them all in one spot is what we do.”

This is not to say that Amelia has ignored the non-motorsports aspect of the automotive world, because it hasn’t. “It’s pretty mind-blowing, when you walk around and see the Delahayes and Rolls-Royces and all the other priceless historics,” said Derek Bell, “but for us, it is nice to see some of the racing cars as well.”

At the end of the day’s judging, after the best-in-class awards have been presented, the Amelia selects, from the 35 wide-ranging classes, one car as Best of Show, Concours d’Elegance, like this year’s breathtaking 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B, and one racecar as the Concours de Sport Best of Show, like the immaculate, delicate-looking 1967 Lotus 49 Formula 1 car, driven by Jim Clark. “That Lotus,” Bell said. “I would have given my right arm to have driven that car.”

“You have to get a wide variety,” Warner said, and he noted that Amelia’s emphasis on racing is not unanimously endorsed by all car enthusiasts. He remembers phoning Jim Patterson, founder of the Rally’s hamburger chain and Long John Silver’s fish restaurants and a prominent automobile collector, to ask if Patterson would bring one of his award-winning cars to Amelia. “’No!’ he told me. ‘I like you, but I don’t like your show!’ And I asked him, ‘What do you not like about it?’ He said, ‘You’ve got too many racecars! You need to be more like Pebble Beach.’ And I said, ‘Jim, us being like Pebble Beach would be like you putting golden arches in front of your restaurants.’”  

Patterson, whose cars have won Best of Show at Pebble Beach twice, relented. He brought his 1937 Delage D8 120 SS Aerodynamic Coupe to Amelia. It won Best of Show at the 2002 concours.

That was the year racer Dan Gurney was Amelia’s honoree, and after Gurney made the announcement, he doused Patterson and Warner with champagne—appropriate, since it was Gurney who first shook up a bottle of Moet and sprayed it on his Ford GT40 teammates, as well as team manager (and 1999 Amelia honoree) Carrol Shelby, and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II at the 1967 24 Hours of Le Mans, thus starting a tradition that will never go away.

A recurring theme at the seminar was how seamless The Amelia seems, year after year, challenge after challenge. “One of the remarkable things I’ve learned here is how much goes on behind the scenes to put on an event like this,” Evernham said. “It’s like going to a Broadway play—you see the show, but you don’t see the writers, you don’t see the rehearsals, you don’t see the musicians, the makeup people, the costumers.”

“Oh, for sure,” Bobby Rahal agreed. Like this year’s Amelia when, with precious little time to prepare, a grim weather forecast for the big day, Sunday, resulted in a complete all-hands-on-deck re-shuffling of the schedule to combine Saturday and Sunday’s activities to all take place on Saturday. In fact, the only thing that happened on Sunday was this seminar, held as rain poured down outside.

“And everything was just perfect on Saturday—you never would have known that it wasn’t the usual Sunday,” said Rahal. “Thankfully, everybody just goes with the flow and understands.” As Evernham said, “You only see the tip of the iceberg. Everything below that water level is what makes it all work. Great communication, great organization, everybody’s just in sync. And that doesn’t just happen,” Rahal said.

“You’ve got to have the people,” said Warner. “We had 750 volunteers every year. The most important thing we’d tell them is that everyone who is coming is our guest. Treat ‘em like one.”

“Running a concours parallels very closely to running a racing team,” Hurley Haywood said. “We as the drivers usually get all the admiration when we’re successful. But the reason we get to victory lane is because of the efforts of the team we’re driving for. Everybody on that team is equal, from the driver on down to the lowest mechanic. What makes a concours work is the cooperation of the entire organization behind the concours. And people forget that.”

Some members of the panel hadn’t been to The Amelia before they were the honoree, and that includes this year’s featured guest, Helio Castroneves. He said the field of cars that greeted him on Saturday was a little overwhelming, including the exhibit that featured many of the racecars he’d driven in his 34-year career. “It was amazing to see,” he said.

With a field of cars that spans more than a century, Amelia is a history lesson. “I can’t believe how cars have evolved over the years,” said David Hobbs. “And how cars are so unbelievably reliable now.” Hobbs started out at Le Mans in 1962, his first of 20 races there. “Look back at those 24-hour races—everybody broke! Obviously your intention was to win, but your real main intent was just to finish. Now you race at Daytona or Le Mans, you have three or four drivers and every one of them is running balls-out the whole time, and they rarely break.”

“I wasn’t that much of a concours person, but I love it now,” said Lyn St. James. “I came and I saw all these racecars, and it made me feel at home. And because of the way Bill and his wife, Jane, treat people. It’s wonderful to see that Hagerty is carrying it on.”

When Warner called St. James and asked her if she’d be the 2021 honoree, “I just responded with dead silence. He said, ‘Do you not want to do it?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s just that I can’t believe it.’ I did it, and it was the most wonderful thing, especially when I saw all my cars on the lawn. Bill said, ‘The only racecar of yours I couldn’t get was your Pinto!’ And I told him, ‘If you get that Pinto, I am going to kill you!’”

Laughter from the audience suggested that many in the crowd knew the story of her Ford Pinto, which St. James and her husband bought new and modified into a racecar, but not too much, because she still had to drive it to work every day: In her very first race, at age 27, at the old Moroso circuit in Florida, she lost control and ended up in a lake that was next to the course. She managed to get to shore before the Pinto sank completely.

Things improved from there. “This was the most extraordinary honor,” St. James said. “To recognize my body of work, which was racing, was amazing. It was a life-changing moment. And it was a way for the industry to recognize that women belong in the sport.”

We’ll give Bobby Rahal the last word. “When Bill asked if I’d be the honoree for 2011, it was a tremendous honor. You look at the names associated with it, just some phenomenal people, and one of the highlights of my life, and my career, and it’s pretty much why I keep coming back. I think this event is just fabulous.

“And I’ve been to the other one, out on the West Coast, and it’s very nice. But the ambiance here, the ease of getting around, the Southern hospitality, is pretty much what separates it. Yesterday, it was early, about 9 a.m., and I was showing a car, and the place was already just full of people. And I thought what an amazing experience this is—all these people have one shared passion, and that’s automobiles. And that’s what it’s all about.”