All the work I did on the Green 330GTC last year was culminating to showing the car at Cavallino in Palm Beach at the Breakers in January. If you followed along on this car, I met the owner during last year’s show to consult on the car. Chas brought his car to Cavallino the two previous years and failed to win a Platinum. The first year, he scored 91 points, and missed the Platinum by 6 points. He requested his score sheets, and fixed the deductions the judges found and returned the following year only to get 85 points! Frustrated with the process, I was asked to look at the car and discuss why the car kept failing to win. This is a common occurrence, and often times owner get frustrated and blame the judges for inconsistencies in scoring, or politics. I explained that, although some of this may be true, it more common that when a car has so many things wrong with it, the Judges stop deducting once the car’s score drops below 85 points. In the 15 minutes a judge has to score a car for Concours Judging, it’s impossible to show everything that is wrong with the car. Therefore, correcting a car purely based on a score sheet is a bad idea. I spent about 30 minutes last year on Chas’ car and easily found 30 things wrong with the car and can be seen in this video I shot during the inspection.

The car was sent to me to correct all the problems, but there were some major issues that we decided were not worth the effort or expense to remediate. I wanted to see if we could make the car as perfect as possible and allow a certain margin of deductions for the things we were willing to lose. I guess I was being pragmatic with the showing of this car without an unlimited budget simply to win an award.

I was also asked to show a SI 330GT 2+2 that I’ve shown several times before at Cavallino. This was a multi Platinum winning car, and I was honored to show it again.

Chas and Darlene proudly parked their Ferrari amongst all the other Ferraris and four other GTCs. The Green, Pino Verde, color really stood out compared to the usual reds, silvers, and blues. I was proud of the work we did on the car, and the public seemed to agree.

When our time came to judging, Chas and I took turns showing the various details of the car and operation. I personally knew where the potential deductions were located, but was hoping the judges wouldn’t see.

Unfortunately at the end of the day we did not win an award. I won’t be sure until we get the score sheets but I have my suspicions on what might have kept us from winning a platinum. The biggest eye sore was the way the driver’s side door closed on this car. No matter the adjustments I made, I could not get the door to close tighter to the body of the car. This kind of door fit should have been addressed before the car was painted, but it was over looked many years ago during a repaint. This was one of the items that I knew was going to hurt us in judging, but I tried my best to correct all the other issues. If I had missed one too many other items, I felt this could hurt us in the end. This may be what happened.

I was pretty disappointed with the result, but it didn’t take long for Chas to tell me he wanted to come back and try again. We will wait for score sheets, and see what the judges found. Hopefully, they are legitimate deductions and we’ll try to figure out what to do with the door. We’re going to try our best to fix the door without repainting the car. I feel there is a limit to the expenses and effort to attain a Platinum, and the owner agrees.

Here’s a video of the day at Cavallino and post show recap.