Filed Under: Things that mean a lot to us.

By Bernard Martin

When Wayne and I started this Concours LLC endeavor, we agreed on several groundrules:

• Any event we product has to be fun for those attending
• Any event we produce has to be profitable for our vendors and sponsors
• Any event we produce has to be welcoming to the media and bloggers and make them feel part of the team
• Any event we product should appear to happen seamlessly, no matter how complex the logistics are behind the scenes. 
  

When we get emails, like this one from Ford Heacock below, and phone calls from some folks we highly respect, and see very kind things written in articles about our events, we know that that the six hours of planning was more important than the six minute solution we could have tossed in and hoped for the best.

At our events we operate on keeping everything simple.  It's called K.I.S.S. by most. We don't ask a volunteer or judge to do anything more than a couple things that they can check off on the fingers of one hand. Otherwise people will  forget things if its too complicated.  This especially holds true for any first year event: You don't know what you don't know. 

At the end of the day, it really takes a team of great people to make a succesful event.  It takes every person on the team jumping in to lend a hand. 

We certainly had an "all hands on deck" moment last May.  We experienced the second highest amount of rainfall since the "1000 Year Flood" that closed the Greenbrier for a few months after the June 2016 high water mark destroyed so much of the facility.

We had watched the weather closely on Saturday and decided that we should be clear of rain during the Concours on Sunday.  We made the call at 2pm on Saturday afternoon. We would not need to implement our "rain plan" that would have required moving cars into the building by late Saturday afternoon.

Sunday was indeed beautiful, albeit slightly overcast, with only a few raindrops at the beginning of the Concours. Perfect weather for the photographers actually. What we had failed to pay close attention to was the severe amount of overnight rain.  I recall Wayne calling me as I was finishing some showfield marking about 10pm at night on Saturday.  The rain was coming down in buckets.  As I walked back to the golf cart for the last time, I told him we where finally ready for tomorrow and I was not going to make it to the Gala but was going to take a hot shower, have a glass of wine and get some sleep.

At 7am Sunday morning the rainfall was slight.  The sun was poking out.  The faces in the judges room where dour.  The water in the creek was almost bursting it's banks.  The wet spots that we had planned driving around, and had marked off, where under water.  In fact, the entrance that pretty much every car had to enter the showfield was now siting in the middle of a 75 foot diameter pond.

We needed a Plan C.  The rain Plan B was to move 5 specific classes, like monopostos and spiders into the bunker.  Anything open top or low ground clearance classes would be in the bunker. 

Plan C

We could still handle that easily and but needed to take care of the other half of of the showfield classes.

The Viper Display was already partially in the building and our Plan B called for the Vipers to take up a special area just outside of where the test mules where located.  That took care of 6 classes. Roy Sjoberg and Team Viper swung into action.  It seemed like those guys where really quite used to pulling things together to make it happen at the last minute!

We still needed a place to put five more judged classes.  Fortunately, the golf pro suggested the idea of putting cars in front of the main entrance to The Greenbrier.  We where very fortunate to have originally planned to use the front entrance for our show.  We pulled out and dusted off the very original plans that called for putting some iconic 20-30's era cars right in the middle of the roundabout and the brass cars under the roof.  We had a plan. We could park all the classes and have a show.

But how do we notify everyone?  It came down to the effort of the judges.  What an incredible group of judges Paul Ianuario assembled.  Each group called their class, told them where to go and when to unload.  The Volunteer hosts who had been to other car shows really pulled out the stops and made if happen.  OODA loops!

What most people didn't see was that the Bunker parking for 5 classes of cars was done by primarily three people. Tom Bungay and Henry Schwartz and I had spent several hours mapping out the final logistics of Plan B on Thursday and Friday before the showfield activities began on Saturday.  Tom and Henry navigated showcars between the pillars in the bunker and got all the classes placed correctly.  A really special thanks to my son, Ian Martin, who I'm told by Tom and Henry, managed to coordinate all 5 classes outside the building before they came into the bunker. I think he learned something working at The Cortile since he was six years old.

It really does take a lot of people to make an event success.  You've got to have a team and a that team you have to trust to do their jobs to the best of their own discretion. 

It's the people that mean alot to us. It's the people that should mean alot to your and your efforts doing a car event.