On the idyllic October day on which this year’s Scarsdale Concours d’Élégance took place, the Most Unique award was presented to a 1974 Lamborghini Espada. One of some 1,200 examples of that model built in 1968-78, the exotic Italian car was distinguished by its pale pink exterior — not a factory color or a Mary Kay car.
The award could have just as fittingly gone to the car’s singular owner, Lorrie Stern, who has had it for 37 years.
Ms. Stern is a trim grandmother of five, an amateur acrobatic pilot — “I just wanted to fly like the World War II pilots,” she said — and a former owner of several other European sports cars, including a 1968 Jaguar E-Type and a 1988 Ferrari Mondial.
The Lamborghini was a gift from her late husband, Stanley. She and her husband were high school sweethearts in New Rochelle. “His last name was S-T and mine was S-C, so we sat next to each other,” she explained. (Her maiden name was Schwartzman.)
After they married, Mr. Stern, a lawyer, bought a Citroën SM, in large part because the French car had a Maserati engine. And it was a Maserati that drew the couple up to Nyack one day in 1973.
“We found out that Bob had a burned-out Maserati Ghibli that was once owned by a racecar driver,” Ms. Stern recalled. But the Sterns were past the point of buying a fixer-upper, she said.
“And then I saw the Lamborghini.”
A hulking brand-new grand touring car with four seats, the Espada had a 350-horsepower V-12 and a 5-speed manual transmission. It was shaped like a wedge — a Bertone design — and the factory color was a bright green.
“I just had to have it,” Ms. Stern said.
The odometer stopped working several years ago, at 98,800 miles; Ms. Stern says that the car has well over 100,000 miles on it now. Many of those came on road trips with the Maserati Club’s eastern chapter — she and her husband were founding members of the group in 1985. Mr. Stern owned a 1980 Maserati Quattroporte that he put 160,000 miles on, she said.
Ms. Stern has piloted the Lamborghini around the road course portion of Pocono Raceway, a track in Pennsylvania whose trioval is one of Nascar’s superspeedways. One year, the Sterns drove it to Florida for a club meet.
In 1979, she had the car painted pink for the first time. “I think it shows off the body lines better,” she said — and in 1992 she undertook a complete restoration. “It was either get rid of it or restore it,” she said.
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