The Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance turned 75 on August 16, and for the first time since it started in 1950 it gave Japanese race cars a class of their own. Class P: Japanese Motorsport went to a 1985 Toyota 85C-L Longtail Le Mans coupe owned by Hisashi Kunie of Gifu City.
The provenance is what makes the result land. The first Japanese class in the event's history was won by a Japanese race car still owned in Japan, entered from Japan.
What "first" actually means
Japanese cars have reached the 18th fairway before. Ken Gross, the chief class judge, drew the distinction plainly: "Although we have had the occasional Toyota 2000GT or more recent concepts, the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance has not presented Japanese racing cars in the past."
That is the gap this class closed. Pebble Beach remains one of the collector-car world's most tradition-bound institutions, and a dedicated judged class carries more institutional weight than an occasional individual invitation or display.
Tradition held at the top, for the record: Best of Show went to Harry Yeaggy's 1935 Duesenberg SSJ Special Speedster, out of a field of 218 cars — 185 from the United States and 33 from overseas.
The cars in the Japanese Motorsport class
The class was built around endurance racing. Conceptcarz published this list of entries ahead of the event; the Concours has not released a public final entrant list for the class, so treat it as the pre-event lineup rather than a confirmed record of what was judged:
| Car |
|---|
| 1985 Toyota 85C-L Longtail Le Mans Coupe |
| 1990 Mazda 767B Le Mans Coupe |
| 1991 Mazda 787B Group C Prototype |
| 1992 Nissan Group C Prototype (24 Hours of Daytona winner) |
| 1996 Honda NSX-GT2 Le Mans Coupe |
| 2010 Honda HPD ARX-01a Le Mans Prototype |
| 2018 Toyota TS050 Hybrid Le Mans Coupe |
One caveat on that list: Mazda's own statement about the class refers to a 1990 787 rather than the 767B named in the entry list. Mazda campaigned both cars in that era, and we have not been able to confirm from the organizers which one was on the lawn.
The 85C-L that won was not the obvious pick. The 787B is the famous one — the first car from a Japanese manufacturer to win Le Mans outright, and the only one to do so until Toyota's victory in 2018 — and the TS050 is the car that ended that drought. The 85C-L comes from earlier, when Toyota was still chasing Le Mans rather than winning it: a long-tail Group C car shaped for the Mulsanne straight, from the years when Japanese manufacturers were spending heavily and finishing behind Porsche.
Why the judges placed it first is not something the results explain. Pebble Beach does not publish class scorecards.
Executives from Mazda and Honda framed the class as recognition of their companies' racing histories. David Salters of Honda Racing Corporation USA reached for the founding logic: "Our founder, Soichiro Honda, believed in competition as a means to improve our company, our engineers and our products, so racing is deeply engrained in the corporate culture of Honda."
Japanese motorsport across Monterey Car Week
This was not the week's only such program. Four days earlier and a few miles inland, the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion at Laguna Seca had made Japanese motorsport its featured marque and added its first JDM car show — a separate event, run by a separate organization, on the same theme in the same week. And on the Concours' own Concept Lawn, Ken Okuyama Cars unveiled the Kode89, a Japanese-built V12 with a manual gearbox.
Nothing published by either organizer suggests the two programs were coordinated. Taken together, though, they put Japanese racing history closer to the center of Monterey Car Week than it has been before.
The likeliest reading is generational. The Japanese performance cars that a younger audience grew up admiring in the 1980s and 1990s are now established collector vehicles, and the 18th fairway is usually the last place to register a shift like that. Quantifying it would take auction data this piece does not have. But the class existed, it was judged, and a car from Gifu won it.