Our photographer Philipp Lucke, caught the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance 2018 in action on Thursday last week. The cars travel a 70 mile round trip from and to The Lodge at Pebble Beach. The route presents a major challenge for some of the cars, especially those that approach their centenary.

From Pebble Beach, the route takes the competitors out to the hills east of Carmel. It then heads onto the historic Highway 1 towards Big Sur before returning to Carmel for lunch. The competitors then travel on to Pebble Beach where they spend the next two days cleaning and preparing their cars for the competition on Sunday.

This year’s tour was a stunning spectacle. The entrants included an incredibly rare 1967 Ferrari 206 S Dino Drogo Spyder, a 1966 Ford GT40 Mark IIB Coupe and a 1955 Maserati A6GCS Frua Spyder. All three, thoroughbred road-legal race cars. Our favourite from this year’s batch was a Ferrari 500 Testa Rossa. The car with perhaps the biggest chance of winning the overall event this year is the 1937 Cadillac V16 Hartmann Cabriolet

For the competitors at Pebble Beach, the Tour is an important aspect of the event. Should two cars be in the running for the same award and a points tie occur, the jury will typically give the advantage to the car that was driven on the tour.