FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla. — Bill Warner’s annual Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance has become the place to be and the place to be seen. Attendance at this year’s running, which ended Sunday, was the largest in its 12-year history. General Motors and Mercedes-Benz utilized this year’s three-day exercise at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel to exploit their product lines. This Concours has become a gathering of key people in the car business, in the racing business and in allied motorsport undertakings. Hundreds of highly placed individuals in motoring, sanctioning body, track ownership and related businesses showed up, taxing the capacity of the facility. The GM presence was headed by vice-president Ed Welburn, chief of Global Design, which won many friends with its varied activities during the weekend. The huge Saturday night black-tie Mercedes-Benz banquet filled the Grand Ballroom of the Ritz and honored five-time Le Mans winner Derek Bell while promoting the company’s new CL500 model. Sunday the close-cropped greensward of the Ritz-Carlton golf course was blanketed by a classic assortment of collector cars. But interest seemed centered more on the noted racing drivers assembled for the Saturday morning seminar than on the cars displayed Sunday. Sir Stirling Moss, John Fitch, John Surtees, Hershel McGriff, David Hobbs, Sam Posey, Brian Redman, Vic Elford, Alain de Cadenet and this reporter spent an hour rehashing to the packed ballroom about great races of the past. Highlight to this reporter was recalling the early-1950s border-to-border Carrera Panamericana, known in this country as the Mexican Road Race, an incredible contest where ye ed — and many of my fellow Yanks — quickly learned the meaning of the Spanish word “dysentario.” So, who did show up at this year’s Concours? Many, many, and here are few who quickly come to mind: Bob and Gary Bahre, Justin Bell, Pete Biro, Pete Brock, Peter Bryant, Joe Buzzetta, Richie Clyne, Tom Cotter, David E. Davis, Hurley Haywood, William Jeanes, Charlie Kemp, Bill King, Leo Levine, Burt Levy, Dr. Mark Moskowitz, Steve Potter, Chuck Queener, Johnny and Betty Rutherford, Bill Spoerle, Joanie Parsons Voyles, Gary Witzenberg, Brock Yates and many more. John Gorsline, where were you?

Last column we noted the success 17-year-old New Jerseyite Paulie Harraka is enjoying during his climb to prominence in auto racing. This week the star is 16-year-old Tanner Swanson of Kingsburg, Calif., who emerged No. 1 in last week’s All-American Driver Challenge contested at the Hickory (N.C.) Speedway. After 14 hours of on-track driving — and relaying car circumstances to crew chiefs — Swanson won the fully paid contract to drive in the 2007 Calico Coatings USAC Ford Focus midget series. Swanson had to outdo nine other finalists for the honor. All contestants drove the same AADC car. Noted car builder Bob East was one of the coaches.

A surprise e-mail from George Stone, Jr. advises that his son, Joe, a fifth-generation family member, recently reopened Stone’s Restaurant in Marshalltown, Iowa. That restaurant, “Under the Viaduct,” has long been an Economaki favorite, as we enjoyed my wedding night dinner there in 1946 and many meals since. Visitors to the new Iowa Speedway in Newton can fine dine there, a 30-minute drive north from the new track. Another surprise electronic message comes from Britain’s retired Rex Woodgate, who, many years ago, was in charge of Aston Martin’s U.S. racing efforts. At the height of the James Bond fever, Woodgate ordered the Aston-Martin featured in the Bond movies brought to this country. He loaned me the car for a few days. My daughters, Tina and Corinne, insisted I drive them to their schools in it so their classmates could examine it up close. The extra equipment added to the famous James Bond coupe, machine guns, up-and-down bullet baffle in the back and other impedimenta, etc., made it so heavy it would never get up to speed. Ford, which now owns Aston Martin, has been trying to sell the brand for months.
Perusing the annual report of the International Speedway Corp. (owner of 12 major U.S. raceways), a surprise was learning that some 50 percent of all tickets sold for its 2006 races were bought via the Internet.

The Fox coverage of NASCAR’s Budweiser Shootout at Daytona led the top-10 network sports telecasts for the Feb. 10-11 weekend, with 5.2 million households. CBS’s coverage of the AFC/NFC Pro Bowl was a close second with 5 million homes counted.

Members of the Rocket Racing League are elated that Kevin Kalkhoven, principal owner of the Champ Car World Series (formerly CART), has joined its board. The RRL is a new aerospace entertainment organization that combines the competition of racing with the excitement of rocketry.

Max Siegel, the president of Global Operations for Dale Earnhardt, Inc., was honored last week in New York City with the Joseph Papp Racial Harmony Award for his efforts to promote better relations between African-American and Jewish communities. Siegel recently joined DEI as overseer of competition, marketing, sales, sponsorship and distribution for the organization, which campaigns a Busch GN team and three Nextel Cup teams.

Ths Unser name reappears. Five-time Indy 500 runner Johnny Unser recently opened www.UnserTire.com, an Internet-based tire sales company to provide users with the right tire at an affordable price. Unser, a technical advisor to Cooper Tire, says his new business offers 17 different tire brands.

Racing team owner Richard Childress is becoming widely known hither and yon. Last week in Phoenix, he delivered a talk entitled “The Importance of Teamwork” (over the years his cars have won 160 races and 10 NASCAR championships) to the American Ass’n of Neurological Surgeons and Congress of Neurological Surgeons. His RCR team is the first to have won championships in the Nextel Cup, Busch GN and Craftsman Truck series.

SCCA members participating in the club’s 50th anniversary celebration March 31 at Watkins Glen Int’l, the historic upstate New York road course, will have to bring their own food and drink. An unexplained March 8 fire destroyed The Glen Club, which contains the track’s catering facility. Track president Craig Rust says the fire will not affect the track’s ability to maintain its 2007 schedule of activity, which begins April 29. The first race weekend is the Sahlen’s Six Hours June 8-10.

Three-time Indy 500 winner Johnny Rutherford will be the speaker at the annual Bench Racing gathering at the Holiday Inn Select opposite Indy’s airport March 16-17. Johnny does know how to persevere, as he DNFd in his first 10 Indy 500 starts but won No.11, the first one he ever finished! Wanna go? Call Jack Martin at (317) 892-2141.

Keith Crain, headman, editor and owner/publisher of Automotive News, gives NASCAR a left-handed compliment for going to unleaded fuel. Why left-handed? Because he reminds it took the racing body 32 years to do so after our government started phasing lead out of our gasoline.

V-8 SuperCar, Australia’s No. 1 racing series, which does so well at home, fared poorly in its recent offshore visit, where it played to row after row of empty grandstands at the Manama road course in Bahrain. The series, which races only two nameplates, Ford’s Falcon and GM‘s Holden Commodore, is hugely popular in Australia and New Zealand. Its Commodore, by the way, is a twin to the Pontiac G6 now sold in this country.

The roster of drivers and owners suggested as candidates for inclusion in the National Midget Racing Hall of Fame contains detailed background data on the nominees, names, places (tracks), dates, victories, cars, engines, crashes, etc. This amazing collection of historical data on the careers of the many nominees makes for outstanding reading. Our thanks to Barbara Hellyer for sending it along. But deciding who to vote for is a truly difficult task.