At 10 p.m. on a Saturday night, it’s curiously quiet just up the road from the Lodge at Pebble Beach, which in a few hours will become the teeming locus of this year’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Crews are undoubtedly scurrying to finish up preparations ahead of the moment the first automobiles will roll onto the lawn, just eight hours from now, but over on the 17th fairway, it?s practically silent. Seventy Ferraris sit, most of them covered, some by plastic sheeting, some under custom-fitted covers. And we?re just wandering around, taking them in, alone, under the high Monterey fog.
We?d been invited down to the grass by Ferrari North America public relations representative and photographer Michael Shaffer, who?d recently taken an interest in light painting and wanted to try it out on some of the historic cars the storied Italian concern had assembled to honor its 70th anniversary. The affable Shaffer, one of the most beloved characters on the international press-junket circuit, is the lens behind plenty of the photos you see credited to ?the Manufacturer? in automotive publications. Although he lends his talents to numerous clients, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool member of the tifosi, and he was perhaps even more thrilled than we were to be out among the cars, left alone in darkness to capture their significant forms.
As far as significance goes, the 212 [above right] pales a bit between the first 125 of 1947 and the series of 250-badged cars...