The Custodian: Fritz Burkard and the Pearl Collection's Case for Using Cars
The Swiss collector behind one of the world's great private collections does not think of himself as a collector at all. On driving irreplaceable cars, and meaning it.
At the 2026 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, one of the four nominees for Best of Show was a 1938 Delahaye 165 Figoni et Falaschi Cabriolet, shown by the Pearl Collection of Baar, Switzerland. Two years earlier, the same collection had won Best of Show outright with its unrestored 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports. The man behind both results is Fritz Burkard, and he is worth understanding, because he represents a philosophy of collecting that is quietly winning the argument in the concours world.
The point of these machines was never to be looked at. It was to be driven.
Burkard's collection, based in Zug, Switzerland, spans from the dawn of motoring to the present day: Grand Prix machinery, idiosyncratic one-offs of the 1960s, modern hypercars. In 2023 the Concours of Elegance at Hampton Court Palace named him its featured Collector, an honor presented by A. Lange and Sohne. But the interesting thing about Burkard is not the inventory. It is the attitude, which he has stated with unusual clarity.
"I see myself more as a custodian, as somebody who has fun for myself and the people around me," he told film-maker Luca Pieri Pilotti. "I get very emotional around my cars, especially when I can see their history, when I can smell it."
Show them, race them, use them
The Pearl Collection's operating principle is the sentence Burkard uses to end most descriptions of it: "We show them, we race them and we use them." This sounds like a pleasantry until you consider what it means in practice. The 1934 Bugatti Type 59 that won Pebble Beach in 2024 was shown unrestored, which is to say the collection chose to present the car as it had survived rather than as a restoration shop could make it look. That decision, once considered eccentric at the highest level of concours judging, is now being rewarded there.
The collection's cars appear at the ICE in St. Moritz, at Goodwood, at the great concours, and on the road. Burkard's view is that a car's aura, his word, is inseparable from its use. "Cars combine several passions: history, design, innovation, the feeling when you drive them, the sound," he told Pilotti. "A car has its own aura. You feel it or you don't."
The custodian idea, taken seriously
There is a temptation to treat the custodian line as modesty, the standard disclaimer of the wealthy collector. It deserves more credit than that. The traditional collector accumulates. The custodian maintains a chain, holding cars in trust between their past and their future, and the measure of the job is whether the cars are better understood and more alive at the end of the tenure than at the beginning. Burkard's insistence on driving, on racing, on showing cars with their history visible, is the practical form of that idea.
It is also, not coincidentally, where the market is going. The prices now being paid for preserved, unrestored cars, the respect now accorded to original finishes and documented patina, and the judging standards that rewarded an unrestored Bugatti at Pebble Beach all point in the same direction. The concours world spent a century perfecting the restoration. It is now learning, car by car, that the bravest thing a collector can do is sometimes nothing at all.
Burkard would presumably object to being cast as a movement. He describes the whole enterprise as fun, for himself and the people around him, and there is no reason to disbelieve him. But the Pearl Collection has become, almost despite itself, an argument made in metal: that the point of these machines was never to be looked at. It was to be driven. The trophies are a side effect.
