How a Bunch of College Kids Beat the Millionaires at Pebble Beach

The Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance is billed as the world's most prestigious car show, and as such, the annual event is largely the domain of some of the wealthiest car collectors on the planet. Only the finest and most meticulously restored vehicles will take the top spot in any given class. But this past summer, something remarkable and unprecedented happened: As millionaire car owners looked on, a Mercedes restored by a group of college students took second place in the Postwar Luxury class.

The 1953 Mercedes-Benz 300 S Cabriolet—and the students—came from McPherson College in Kansas, home to the nation's only four-year degree program in automotive restoration. We've visited McPherson before, and what we saw there was astonishing in its own right. But the journey from a remote campus two hours west of Topeka to a spot on the Pebble Beach podium proved to be even more so. We talked to McPherson students and staff, as well as Pebble Beach judges, to learn more about how it happened.

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Pebble Beach: The Ultimate Headline

"We were trying to create a vision," McPherson College president Michael Schneider said of the motivation behind the project, "and we did an exercise: Create a headline for 10 years [from now]. The headline was 'McPherson College wins Pebble Beach.' Pebble Beach is symbolic of the best. We wanted to integrate that into our entire curriculum. We didn't want it to just be a project that our students helped with. We wanted it to be a project they were integrated in, that lots and lots of students could be a part of."

Before we continue, it's important to know that McPherson's degree program goes far beyond hammering metal, spraying paint, and stitching leather. Students learn not just the history of the automobile but also the history and evolution of the processes used to make it so the cars they work on can be restored as accurately as possible.

Chris Bock, chief judge at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, explained the importance of this background work. What counts at Pebble, he said, is "doing this incredibly detailed and faithful research so that the car is presented as Mercedes would've presented it to the first owner who bought it in 1953. Originality and authenticity are the two keywords in our judging at Pebble Beach, and [McPherson] rang the bell on all of that."

More Than Painting a Car

"Really, the whole purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate how liberal arts informs the technological study of the car, as well," said Amanda Gutierrez, McPherson's executive vice president and provost. "We talk a lot about how our students aren't just learning to paint a car. They're learninghowthe car was painted. They have to be able to think critically, assess a problem, and find a solution. They have to communicate as a team. There's science, there's engineering, there are all these things that go into restoring a car."

While Schneider acknowledged the technical part of the restoration process itself was pretty straightforward, it was the next-level teamwork and desire to get it not just right but perfect that brought out the best in the team. "It's the time, the dedication, the art, and the science," he said. "When you talk to the students, you'll hear about how they had to learn to work together, how they had to sort through managing their time and all these other hidden pieces that make a project go."

Among the many McPherson students who worked on the Mercedes project was Wyatt Miceli, who was well aware of the ridiculously high standard they needed to achieve for success at Pebble Beach. "The cars I grew up working on, I call them catalog cars," he said. "You can go into a catalog and order a headlight, a quarter panel, whatever you want. For this car, it's just not the same. Every single nut, bolt, washer, cotter pin has to be perfect, as it rolled off the factory line. And some of those items don't exist anymore, so we had to make them. There's a lot more involved in this kind of restoration process. It's hard to compare this car to what most people would consider a restoration on their grandma's '65 Mustang. They're two very different standards."

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Finding the Right Car for Pebble Beach

McPherson acquired the 1953 Mercedes 300 S in the spring of 2016. "We had Paul Russell, who's our advisory board chair, out there looking for the right car," Gutierrez said. (Russell's world-renown restoration shop, Paul Russell and Company, has sent countless cars to Pebble.) "We were actually walking around at Pebble Beach, and he said to me, 'I think what you need is a Mercedes-Benz 300 S. It will challenge you, it will stretch you, but it won't break you. That's what you need. You need the students to be inspired that they're capable of more than they thought. '"

After a lengthy search, Russell eventually contacted Richard Hopeman, who had a 300 S in his garage. They talked about the program and what McPherson was looking to accomplish with the project. Hopeman, who'd been battling cancer, was an educator and an engineer himself and had a number of apprentices in his shop learning similar skills. The stars aligned.

"Dr. Hopeman decided the car was going to come to McPherson College, and he actually transferred the car to us and died hours later," Gutierrez said. "It's neat that the idea of education, engineering, the automobile, and the apprenticeships were part of his life, and now his story is carried forward in what we've done with this car."

While Russell believed the 300 S wouldn't break the students, according to chief judge Bock, the McPherson team picked an extremely difficult car to restore to Pebble Beach standards. "They undertook a really hard car," Bock said. "A mid-50s Mercedes S is essentially a handbuilt car and amazingly complex. The carburetion, the sophistication of the engine, all the minute details, and the trimming and the woodwork in it—that was a major undertaking. That was a brave jump into the pool."

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The Student Team

Once the car was acquired and plans set in motion, word spread throughout the restoration industry and among the student body that McPherson was aiming for one of the highest prizes in the classic car world. "I was interested in this project when I visited as a high school senior, and that just drew me to the school, and I really wanted to work on it," student Jeremy Porter recalled. "This is the first full restoration that I have been a part of.  You're walking in with, 'This is the quality you have to go with.' This is your benchmark; it's the best of the best."

Because progress on the car wouldn't necessarily track against the curriculum—and because the restoration would take longer than the span of a four-year degree program—restoration was done by teams of students working outside of class hours.

"These are full-time students," Gutierrez said, "so they were going to class then working on [the Mercedes] outside of class, giving up weekends and getting up early in the morning when the temperature was just right to paint the car."

The students were supervised by Brian Martin, a McPherson alum who worked in the industry before returning to McPherson as director of auto restoration projects. He found it rewarding to watch the students work toward a common goal, especially so given that it was outside of the normal McPherson curriculum. "That's probably the best thing about this whole project, knowing they wanted to do this to help the college and being able to use it to move their own careers forward," Martin said.

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Doing While Learning

"It's interesting to watch these students mature, because a lot of the work that they did on this car they hadn't maybe had the class in how to do it yet," Gutierrez said. "They were learning as the project progressed, and they were able to take what they'd learned and go back into their class and say, 'Here's an example that we learned on the Mercedes,' whether it's parts resourcing or documentation or historical or technical. They were able to inform the classroom work that was happening."

According to Miceli, the students on the team fully understood the gravity of the project and how important it was to get it right, even if it meant doing something more than once. Those lessons have been translated to every project they do. "If one of us thinks that we can do it better, everyone else, and whoever did that piece first, is going to respect them trying it again in the hopes that it'll be better than it was," he said.

Victoria Bruno, another of the many McPherson students who worked on the Mercedes, echoed Miceli's sentiment. "If we run into an issue and we don't know what to do, we ask for help and we consult each other," she said. "Once a piece is completed, we'll stand around and look at it and say, 'Is this good enough?' If the answer is no, well, we redo it until it is."

That attention to getting things right was noticed by the judges, as Pebble's Bock recalled: "There were three mid-50s 300-series Mercedes in the class, and [McPherson] came out on top of all three. These students did their homework. They did a great job. There were no authenticity deductions in the judging of that car. The only deductions were just very minor little things, which restorers learn through the years."

In addition to the actual highly detailed work itself, what can often make or break whether a car achieves a best-in-class or best-in-show designation is its provenance, which is even more important at a world-class event like Pebble Beach. Martin said that because the Mercedes was restored by the McPherson team, it will only add to the car's provenance down the line. "In 10, 20 years from now, when these guys are all famous and helping run and shape this industry, people are going to look back on this car as one of their first achievements," he said. "This provenance is being created right now. That is something really special."

The Big Finish

The award ceremony at Pebble Beach is tense: Three cars in each class get the nod, and all three drive up to the winner's ramp, but they don't know their finishing order until they are called. When Class O-3, Postwar Luxury was called, McPherson's Mercedes arrived with another 300 S Cabrio—a '54 resplendent in yellow—and a '55 Imperial convertible built as a one-off for former Chrysler president K.T. Keller. The crowd was buzzing; many if not most of the attendees knew about the McPherson car.

First, the yellow Mercedes got the nod for third place. Then the McPherson students were tapped to drive up for second. The crowd well and truly went wild.

Second place? It wasn't an outright win, but at the world's most exclusive car show, among the world's finest classic cars, it was an astonishing triumph—one that has escaped hundreds of cars (and owners and restorers) in Pebble's long and storied history.

"We had cars on our field from some of the most respected shops in the country that got second or third place in class and were happy to get it," Bock said. "So, as I say, to get that position was quite a remarkable achievement, and they should really be proud of their work. They did a truly remarkable job on that car."

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Beat by a Bunch of Kids

And what of the car's competitors? Were the wealthy collectors, who by Pebble rules will never again be able to enter that car in the Concours d'Elegance—not to mention the restoration shops whose clientele had spent millions of dollars—angry that they'd been beaten by a bunch of kids? Gutierrez said she and the school felt nothing but love and support from the crowd.

"I think what's been really remarkable about this is the incredible industry support," she said. "From the collector car community, when we drove that car on the [Tour d'Elegance], there were cheers all along for McPherson College. That's so exciting. Our students get to see that this is an industry that wants them and an industry that is invested in their success."

"When you get students who are serious together," McPherson president Schneider said, "it doesn't matter what their background is. When they're serious and when they have the right guidance and resources, it's amazing what they can do. It really is."

Photos Provided By McPherson College