Speed Style Beauty 2011 – Report and Photos

Report and photos by Ben Dillon
Speed Style Beauty was held 25-27 November 2011 at the Portside Wharf in Brisbane, Australia.
Speed Style Beauty, a display of rolling art from over a century of car design got off to a strong start as one of Australia’s newest but most impressive car shows with vehicles as diverse and disparate as a 1910 Brush and a 2011 Ferrari California on display all in the name of charity.
Aimed at showing cars as art and taking its name from the similarly titled exhibition of the Ralph Lauren car collection, Speed Style Beauty organiser Rod Gould garnered some very rare and desirable classics from various collectors in and around Brisbane with all proceeds going to Young Care, a charity that assists Australians under 65 to get out of aged care.
“We wanted to do something a bit different as a charity fund raiser instead of the usual raffle,” Gould said.
More European-focused than is the norm for an Australian show (the only Australian car was an ex-Dick Johnson XC Ford Falcon race car) Speed Style Beauty 2011 gave the visiting public a chance to get close to some mouth-watering exotics including an ex-Phil Hill 1955 Ferrari Monza 750, Lamborghini 400 GT and Countach LP400 as well as a recreation of the very first BMW Art Car, a 3.0 CSL painted by sculptor Alexander Calder.
Other cars included a trio of Rolls-Royces with Wraith, Camargue coupe and an imperious Phantom III with H.J Mulliner Sedanca de Ville coachwork on show, along with a 1926 Bentley 3-Litre, 1958 Porsche RSK and 1933 Aston Martin International long chassis.
One of the star attractions was to be a 1935 Bugatti T57 C, but gearbox failure on the way to the venue saw it being replaced with the owner’s intriguing Tatra T87 featuring a rear-mounted air-cooled V8, surely the only one of its kind in Australia.
Other oddities included a Mercedes 500K roadster replica powered by a 460ci Ford V8 and an Australian-designed Giocattolo Group B, a fusion of Alfa Romeo Sprint body and mid-mounted 5.0-litre Holden V8. One of only 15 made from 1986 to 1989 the Giocattlolo (Italian for ‘toy’) employs Kevlar and carbon composite body panels and at the time gave supercars a real run for their money.
Speed Style Beauty may be one of the less established classic car shows in Australia but if the quality of vehicles on display this year was anything to go by, it deserves marking down on the calendar as an annual must-see.
Speed Style Beauty 2011 – Photo Gallery (click image for larger picture and description)
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[Source: Ben Dillon]