TRUTH AND BEAUTY IN BUILDING 4; Once again, the Grand National Roadster Show goes for both.(News)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Beauty is the thing that drives us all: the most beautiful girlfriend, the most beautiful view out the front window of the most beautiful house and, of course, the most beautiful car.

When it comes to cars, beauty has been quantified once a year at the Grand National Roadster Show by a set of judges who bestow the title of "America's Most Beautiful Roadster'' (or AMBR, pronounced "amber'') to one lucky builder. The judges try hard to satisfy everyone and always wind up satisfying only one guy. But that one guy always leaves very happy.

Those who don't win the nine-foot-tall wood and brass trophy might agree with Albert Camus, who said, "Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.''

There have been 58 AMBR winners so far, and they have all enjoyed their own short stretches of that eternity. The feeling, or the want of it, is enough to drive countless others to bend, crimp, polish and shape all manner of roadsters into what they pray someone, they hope a judge, will think is beautiful.

At this year's show, held again in six huge halls at the L.A. County Fairplex in Pomona, California, there was beauty in abundance. A lot of it was in the eyes of a lot of beholders. Sometimes it was only in the eye of the owner. But it was there, man, you just had to look around.

Of the 12 cars officially entered in the AMBR category, there were definitions of beauty that covered all corners of the term.