By D. Brian Smith

Photography: D. Brian Smith

The 2023 Concorso Italiano was a most interesting event to cover for the team at Monterey Car Week. Since the early 2000's I've covered this fun show for various magazines and websites. In my early days as Feature Editor of Custom Classic Trucks magazine and then as Editor of KIT CAR magazine, I managed to convince my colleagues that it made sense to publish event coverage articles in these two esteemed publications. This was despite the fact that there aren't usually many vintage Italian trucks on display at the Concorso.

Of course, in terms of KIT CAR magazine, there are plenty replicas of vintage Italian sports, super, and exotic cars available for gear heads to purchase and build. So, covering the Concorso when I was the Editor of this great title made perfect sense.

In fact, to give you a sense of how much reach KC magazine had, I used a sublime photo that I took of a field of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis, Alfas, De Tomasos, Fiats, Lancias, Iso Grifos, Iso Bizzarrinis, and etc. from the Concorso Italiano event that year for a Calender of Events two-page spread that was in each issue of KIT CAR. I actually received a cease and desist letter from Ferrari corporate's lawyers telling me to remove the photograph from the pages of the magazine. I replied to Ferrari's legal team with a scathing letter and explained to them about Freedom of the Press and The 5th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. In other words, I basically told them to Pound Sand. I never heard from them again. And kept publishing that cool photo.

Fast forward to 2010, I covered the Concorso Italiano, the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, and Gordon McCall's Motorworks Revival at the Monterey Jet Center for a website that friend Ben Moment and I created called Redline Review (dot com). We created Monterey Car Week (dot net) in 2013 and have covered the Concorso on this site ever since.

Most every mid-August my working vacation is in the Monterey area for these superb automotive enthusiast events. I don't currently earn any income from this website. Photographing and writing about these epic automobiles is a labor of love for me. I do also earn a living as a writer for Classic Industries. Classic sells American muscle car parts.

At this year's Concorso, I learned that there are two levels of media. The Concorso organizers have VIP media and regular media. VIP media can enjoy VIP food with the guests that have paid for VIP tickets. Regular media get to take photos of cars and write an article. If regular media wishes to eat, they can buy some food from one of the food trucks. If they wish to drink some water, they need to bring their own water or buy a beverage from one of the food trucks. Had I known that Monterey Car Week was regular media before the event, I would have brought some water and had some breakfast before the show. In past years, the Concorso offered a media tent for all of the journalists. They provided food and beverages for all of the media.

At the 2022 Concorso MCW had a VIP media credential. I naively thought that this is something you provide for all of the auto journos who obtain media credentials.

If you didn't want to have MCW cover the event, you should have simply rejected my credential application, as opposed to treating MCW as a second class website.

Now that I have written about what wasn't very good about the 2023 Concorso Italiano, let's check out what was great -- the Italian automobiles and motorcycles.