At the Clevelant event (and what event it was!), I once again had the opportunity to participate in the Millenium Concours judging sponsored by DMC. All the judges from the St. Louis Millenium Concours participated again this time, and the benefit of accumulated experience was clearly evident. All judges focused on a different aspect of the car this time than at the St. Louis event in order to further increase the knowledgebase and to add some variety for the judges. I thought that the carry-over of experience was extremely useful in refining and improving the judging process. For example, I judged operating controls this time and through the throughtful suggestions and comments Bill Swilley provided based on the operating controls judging from St. Louis, we developed a streamlined coreography to judge operating controls that would be as efficient as possible. Such improvements will undoubtedly continue to be made during the course of the next judging events and I expect each DMC sponsored concours will be even better than the previous ones. In addition to making improvements to the specific judging areas, changes were also made to decrease the overall judging time for each car. Although each car still underwent approximately 2.5 person-hours of judging (DMC has developed judging standards for the Millenium Concours that are highly detailed), the time each owner had to spend tending to his/her car was reduced to slightly over 1 hour by having several aspects of the each car judged simultaneously (for example, the trunk area and engine compartment were judged simultaneously, etc). This hopefully made the experience better for the concours participants. Once again we had the pleasure of judging some of the finest examples of DeLoreans around and once again DMC did an outstanding job of keeping everything organized and keeping the judges well informed of their responsibilities. All the details were already worked out for us so that all we had to concentrate on was doing the judging -- everything from judge's breakfast for pre-judging briefing, to judges shirts, and even refreshments in the DMC "mother ship" was provided by DMC. Thanks to James for all his hard work that made the judging such a nice experience. Several of the cars that participated in the concours had also participated in the previous concours in St. Louis. I believe that without exception, the returning cars scored better this time than they did in St. Louis (one would expect this since deduction areas are identified and can be corrected). Altough all the cars were very fine examples of excellent condition DeLoreans, the point-spread between the cars was sufficient for the rankings to be unambiguous. With the granularity of deductions assessed, I would estimate that the closest spread between cars was about 7-8 deductions. I discovered a few common deduction areas in my area of operating controls that some of you may be interested in if you are preparing to participate in future competitions (or if you participated in the Cleveland event but have not gotten the judging sheets back yet). - I think every car had some deduction for door operation. Unfortunatley, I believe that this will necessarily be the case since there is a fraction of a point deductioed for non-original struts and there is also deduction for doors that don't rise all the way to the top. Since there will be no original struts that raise the door all the way to the top all the cars end up with some sort of door operation deduction. However, there were also several cars that had replacement struts where the doors still did not operate quite to spec. A properly operating door should rise all the way against the stops unassistend when opening the door. - Nearly every car got a small fraction of a point deducted for the concole clock not being set properly. The judging handbook points this out, but it is easily overlooked. - A couple cars got point deductions for A/C that was not charged well and did therefore not cool well. - Nearly every car got a small fraction of a point deducted for the license plate lights. For some reason nearly all of the plastic lenses were very dirty from the back side. This is probably due to the fact that the lenses are horizontal and thus dirt/grime will settle on the inside of the lens. Also, there may be tendency for dust to enter this space during driving. Overall , the cars were outstanding examples and having gone through the judging process once again I identified many minor things that I could readily improve on my DeLoreans. I found the judging to be a rewarding experience and I would encourage others to consider participating as judges if they get the chance. And again thanks to DMC and James for making the judging such a good experience and to Ken and all the others that put on such an outstanding show. Knut