Last Year’s Tulipwood Best of Show Is Still the Clearest Concours Lesson
Five days before the 75th Concours, last year’s Best of Show is still the useful yardstick: André Dubonnet’s mahogany Hispano-Suiza Torpedo, restored back to its original skiff shape after a later owner hid it under pontoon fenders.
PEBBLE BEACH — Before Sunday’s 75th Pebble Beach Concours crowns a new Best of Show, look back one year. The lawn already told you what it rewards.
On August 17, 2025, Penny and Lee Anderson Sr. of Naples, Florida, took the top trophy with a 1924 Hispano-Suiza H6C Nieuport-Astra Torpedo. The field that day was 229 cars, including 55 international entries from 22 countries.
The winner was not another perfect paint job. It was a wood-bodied race car built for André Dubonnet, the aperitif heir and World War I flying ace who put it into Sicilian endurance work almost as soon as it left the shop.
Everyone still calls it the Tulipwood. The body is mahogany. Aircraft maker Nieuport-Astra in Argenteuil built it to a design by Henri Chasseriaux: thin strips carved to shape, laid over ribs, and locked down with about 8,500 rivets. The finished skin reportedly weighed about 160 pounds when new. Boat-and-airplane thinking, bolted to a Spanish-Swiss chassis.
Dubonnet finished sixth in the 1924 Targa Florio and fifth in the Coppa Florio. A later owner added pontoon fenders that softened the silhouette.
The Andersons bought the car at RM Sotheby’s Monterey sale in 2022 for $9.245 million, then sent it to RM Auto Restoration in Ontario for more than 12,000 hours aimed at the original torpedo form.
Concours Chairman Sandra Button’s public read was blunt: advanced underpinnings, hand-built lightness, Dubonnet provenance, and a shape you can finally see again.
Lee Anderson’s own hook was simpler. He collects antique wood boats. When he saw the Hispano, he recognized the varnish language before he finished the chassis story. That lands for households that already treat craft materials, marque books, and garage display as culture, not only horsepower.
The win was Hispano-Suiza’s third Pebble Beach Best of Show and its first since 1989. It was also a second top trophy for the Andersons after 2016. Walking the 75th fairway this Sunday, keep that bar in mind: rare, documented, correctly restored, and historically alive beats expensive alone.
This year’s Concours will feature Ferrari and Vignale coachwork, plus Road Racing Greats classes that pull the show back toward Del Monte Forest. Keep the Tulipwood nearby as you watch. Paint can be perfect. Wood that raced Sicily and still reads as one unbroken object is harder.
Pair this with our concours-worthy explainer, the modern Concours platform note, and the Pebble Beach Concours 2026 page. For the week’s paper trail, see the 75th poster set and Tuesday’s automobilia auction. Drive timing lives in the San Francisco to Monterey road trip.