2010 Concours Highlights

Ron Summer and I were particularly pleased with this year’s (fifth annual) event and we want to thank everyone that displayed this year and the volunteers that helped with unloading, setup, vote tabulation, and clean-up well into the evening.  We had 50 bikes on the field for the Concours this year (up from the last two) and the quality and rarity of the entries ran high. Weather which is always a factor at an outdoor event in Washington State was cooperative with a cool clear morning turning into a sunny afternoon.

We have streamlined our judging procedures over five years and the judging this year went relatively quickly and smoothly with only a couple of hiccups.

We have never had to judge two bikes so close to identical as the pair of 1938 Snyder built Hawthorne Zeps presented by Mike Kammer and Rick Collier. There were differences between the bikes but for every scratch on one, there was an equal small flaw on the other. After plenty of deliberation, we did what any right-minded judge would do and delegated further consideration to a group of participants we extracted from the crowd. Even this de facto jury could not come up with a unanimous decision but in the end Rick Collier graciously admitted to changing out his crank set when he was assembling the bike for the show which gave us grounds to break the tie.

The same group of emergency tie breakers were held in service a while longer as the judges used them in several other cases where the bikes were too close to judge or one of the judges could have been influenced by ownership.

In the final round of judging for presentation of the singular Best in Show trophy, again the judges were confronted by several bikes that were difficult to choose between more for their differences than their similarities. This led to a first place tie between the outstanding, original, 1936 Rollfast V-200 of Mike Thompson and the flamboyant, restored, 1937 Roadmaster Supreme that I brought to the event. (Another case where I stepped aside before the crucial decision but allowed myself plenty of input up to that point)

Below you will find a full list of the Trophy and Ribbon winners for 2010.

We also implemented a judged “Certificate of Honorable Mention” set of awards for the first time this year to acknowledge many of the contenders that ultimately did not win in the Trophy and Ribbon categories but brought bikes that deserved note. A list of those bikes and their owners follows the Trophy and Ribbon list

Following the Honorable Mention list is a list of all the bikes present at the 2010 Lemay Concours and the owners of those bikes, again thanks to everyone who participated. I hope we will see you all back again next year when our feature spotlighted marque is Westfield Manufacturing and Columbia bikes and other related badges produced between 1878 and the RX5 reproduction of 1987.  In addition we will have several special classes for Pre-balloon bicycles and for all makes of Moto-Balloon bicycles.