Tutto Bene, FAT Mankei, Meyers Manx Café — three places show how heritage gets re-told. Lightly handled, precise, beyond any format.
The old question of what a sportscar event actually is can be answered most honestly right now by looking at where the most interesting people in a scene turn up — and which of those places resists categorisation most stubbornly. Three of them have emerged over the last two years. None is a classic event. None is just a location. What links them is a stance: treating heritage as material, not inventory.
It is a shift that stays invisible in marketing decks and has long since happened in the minds of drivers. The OEM events of the past decade haven't worn thin because their products got weaker. They wore thin because their choreography became predictable. The attention in this scene is now won with smaller gestures: a former petrol station, a mountain hut, a mountain road. Three places that are still finding their shape — and that draw their pull precisely from being unfinished.
On two days in September, the Strada Borromea — the private road that climbs from Gignese up to Mottarone — turns into something between a hillclimb and a village fête. Garlands in the wind. Espresso cups on white linen. Aperol Spritz. An SF90 drifts through a hairpin and the audience applauds, not the way they would at a racetrack but the way they would on a piazza in Milan: politely, curiously, with the quiet awareness that this isn't a contest.
Tutto Bene is the joint work of the Milanese design studio BorromeoDeSilva and the Californian agency Race Service. The first edition ran in 2024; the second arrived in September 2025 with Alfa Romeo as headline partner and an appearance by the Maserati GT2 Stradale, whose Nettuno V6 cuts the mountain air more precisely than any trailer would suggest. Around 80 cars are invited. There is no timing, no classification, no podium. The motto, set by the curators: Slow Down to Go Fast.
It is the inversion that carries the format. A hillclimb here works not as a contest but as an occasion — the older cousin of the Italian village fête, the kind one attends even without knowing anyone under the tent. A Jaguar D-Type rolls past an XJ220. No one measures. No one compares. It is enough that the cars are there and that the people who come with them recognise one another.
The curator move is plain to see here: speed is returned to its dramaturgical place, not declared an end in itself. That is not a small gesture. It is a correction.
Nearly 600 kilometres north-east, on the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, Ferdinand Porsche opened the FAT Mankei in May 2023. The name comes from Austrian dialect and refers to the alpine marmot. The architecture was developed by Porsche himself with Steiner Architecture: two buildings of layered natural wood that will age at different speeds, alongside a pavilion with a latticed glass façade — so that birds don't fly into it.
The High Alpine Road is where the earliest Porsche cars were tested. It was this region in which the family put down roots. The Mankei is therefore neither a brand centre nor a staged heritage display. It is a meeting place — restaurant and café in the main building, a rotating vehicle exhibition in the pavilion. What has developed there was not planned: a scene that no longer goes to any official OEM event comes here.
The merchandise running under the FAT International label helps. Limited, precisely made, often in collaboration with houses such as Porsche Design — a dedicated Chronograph 1 edition with a Mankei strap is among the more recent releases. The logic is that of a SoHo boutique, not a fan shop by the racetrack exit. To take something home is to take a trace of the place, not an advertising surface.
What makes the Mankei interesting is not the architecture alone. It is that a family bearing an industrial legacy of this size is capable, at an inherited site, of building not a mausoleum but a room in which the next generation meets. That is heritage work that steps back.
The third place sits at the entrance to St. Moritz. An old Shell petrol station, its plaster flaking, its shutters hanging, its pump still running. In 2023 it became the outpost of Meyers Manx Café — the Californian concept that Phillip Sarofim has been expanding into a small geography of meeting points since acquiring the dune-buggy icon Meyers Manx.
The Swiss version is the most disciplined. Inside, pharmacy furniture from Leipzig was installed — a hundred years of patina built into the fabric. Outside, you still fill up: Shell V-Power, 100 octane, at a pump that has kept its function. Thursday to Sunday, 9am to 5pm. In winter it is the obligatory stop for participants of The ICE on the frozen St. Moritz lake — an encounter not in the programme, but reliably there every year.
What is right about this petrol station is the double function. It is not a café with petrol-station décor. It is both — the machine and the room in which the machine is talked about, inside one building. Heritage is not quoted here. It is used.
Three places, three geographies, three quite different points of entry. What links them is not a style — Milanese late summer, high alpine timber and Californian pharmacy cabinets have little optically in common. What links them is a method.
First: heritage as raw material, not as relic. The Strada Borromea, the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, an abandoned Shell station — all three are found substances given a new programme without disguising themselves. Second: no VIP logic. No velvet rope, no doorman, no tiered access. Filtering happens through interest, not entitlement. Third: the curator's hand stays visible. At Tutto Bene the curators are BorromeoDeSilva and Race Service; at the Mankei the curator is Ferdi Porsche; at the Manx Café St. Moritz the concept itself is the curator. In all three cases one knows who decided — and that is precisely what carries these places.
The trick is not converting a petrol station, or rethinking a hut, or renting an old mountain road. The trick is the decision to leave the format open. Not quite an event. Not quite a place. Exactly the gap in which the next generation of drivers is finding its footing.
If you haven't been, go. If you've been once, you'll know there is more on a second visit than a first. It lies in the nature of these places: they improve by being visited.
Philipp Lauterbach is the founder of DRIVTO, the curated identity and discovery platform for the European sportscar scene. Based in Düsseldorf, he has been building sportscar communities since August 2018 — first through the Cars+Coffee format in Düsseldorf, Cologne, Berlin, Mönchengladbach, and on Sylt, and since mid-2024 through DRIVTO as a platform with its own editorial magazine and proprietary DriverDNA methodology.
His path into the sportscar world began with an event-management apprenticeship inside a Mercedes-Benz dealer group. From there he moved into marketing roles at Ferrari and Maserati in Düsseldorf, where he became one of the defining marketing voices for these brands in Germany at the time. That phase also gave him his first direct contact with the Cars+Coffee movement — and the affinity for Italian cars that still shapes him today. Ferrari and Pagani have been at the center of what he himself seeks as a driver ever since.
Before DRIVTO, he established the Cars+Coffee stations across several German cities — an independent event series that at its most active phase connected more than 1,500 sportscar drivers across the DACH region. The DRIVTO driver community grew out of that base. His editorial focus sits on the pillars Cars Connect People (personal founder voice, driver stories) and State of the Scene (data-grounded market analyses, industry essays).
