Reviving A 356 America Roadster For Pebble Beach Concours Is No Simple Task

Over 4200 hours of work went into restoring this car for the Pebble Beach concours. Astonishingly, Road Scholars managed to get this car ready for the event in just 7 months from start to finish. In order to get the car ready, the America Roadster needed to be stripped down to bare nothing in order to be rebuilt up to as-original specification. When the car arrived to the RS shop, it did not have its convertible top, bumpers, or engine lid grilles, and each of those needed to be fabricated from scratch for the car to be correct.

This car, an aluminum bodied lightweight racing car, was treated from the outset as a motorsport entry. It got beat on and banged up, it had its bumpers and windshield removed. It had been repainted and patched a number of times. For a points concerned restoration, the car needed to have all of that repaired and returned to its original long-lost color. The team, in the process of teardown, found a small section of the original paint in the engine lid, and were able to recreate the original one-off color for the project. Similarly, the team managed to track down original photographs of the car as-raced in the 1950s in order to determine the correct interior color. These are the lengths to which a proper restoration shop needs to go, especially when the world’s most prestigious concours is the goal.

While the car didn’t win its class, it did place on the podium of the six-car class. Not only does a car need to be perfect in order to receive an invitation to the concours in the first place, but it has to be the most perfect of all the perfect in order to place on the podium. It might be a minor disappointment to not get the overall trophy, but Road Scholars can add another trophy to its shelf, and the fact that the company has scored more than one is testament to the work they’ve done. Here’s the whole story, as they tell it. It’s worth watching.