Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance isn’t normal BangShift fodder. Every year, 200 cars are brought out onto the 18th hole of the Pebble Beach Golf Course and if your car is invited, you should consider yourself honored among the automotive elite. Sure, there’s plenty of machinery there that is worth the history lesson, and there are cars there that are truly and legitimately valuable, but unless it’s a historic racer, most of the classes aren’t, on the whole, something that we pay a ton of attention to. However, for the 2015 Concours d’Elegance, there is a category that is without question right up our alley: Custom Mercury.

Specifically, Custom Mercury is tailored to the 1949-51 Mercury Eight and the early “lead sled” builds that cemented the quintessential “hot rod Merc” look for years to come. This was the car that the early “traditional” hot rodders accepted and is responsible for kicking off the “custom” trend. They weren’t meant to be fast, but instead the plain-jane Mercury lent itself as a rolling blank slate for guys to improve on. Being Pebble Beach, the cars that are being invited are going to be the early builds or the well known builds, like the Barris and Hirohata cars (pictured), as well as the Mercury from the James Dean film Rebel Without A Cause. While there are no set attendees yet, there’s a list of about fifteen cars that are being looked at for inclusion. This might prove difficult, as some of the cars have gone AWOL over the years.

The impressive part of this move by Pebble Beach is that hot-rodding is finally receiving it’s due. The Concours has always been about the artistic detail and mechanical beauty of cars, but up until now has pretty much ignored anything that was customized post-factory. All of these Mercs started life as a pretty plain Mercury Eight, but with talent, skill, and an artistic eye these cars became much more than that. Instead of the classic view of a hot rod as a rolling deathtrap that was a neighborhood scourge, they have become a symbol of creativity. According to Ken Gross, who acts as a historian and assists with Pebble Beach, ““The cars hail from an exuberant era when backyard mechanics and bodymen were convinced they could build stylish automobiles as well as any major automaker. These cars are rolling proof that they did.”

The 2015 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance will be held August 16, 2015.