On Saturday, April 5th, The Claremont Colleges Automotive Enthusiasts Club held its first annual car show, The Claremont Concours: Celebrating the Art of the Automobile, an event featuring more than 65 cars from various classes and eras, including Ferraris, Vectors, Porsches, Mercedes Benzes and Bentleys.

“The show is the result of scores of people working together, or it never would have happened,” says CCAEC co-founder Graham Tharp '05. “We had lots of students and administrators who helped us out immensely," vice president Jeff Simonetti '05 added. “We worked hard on the show for over four months, and I was really proud of how it turned out.”

About a dozen alumni participated in the first-ever car show. Among the entries displayed on Parents Field, true stand-outs included a Ferrari 550 Maranello owned by Richard Marconi, Founder of the Marconi Foundation for Kids; a 1992 Vector W8 Turbo (only 17 were ever built) owned by Michael Lajtay '88; and a tricked-out Toyota Celica representing the Swift Car Club that will make an appearance in the forthcoming feature film 2 Fast 2 Furious. The show also included talks from guests Dick Marconi and Ken Okuyama, former head designer at Pininfarina Ricerca e Sviluppo S.p.A of Italy.

The CCAEC’s roster includes more than 145 students from across The Claremont Colleges. Tharp says a second car show is being planned for next year, with hopes to get “twice as many cars.”

This Toyota Celica was among the entries in The Claremont Concours: Celebrating the Art of the Automobile, a car show organized earlier this month by members of The Claremont Colleges Automotive Enthusiasts Club. The Celica is scheduled to appear in the upcoming John Singleton feature film, 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Special guest Dick Marconi, owner of the Marconi Automotive Museum in Tustin, brought along a couple of his Ferraris.