Fuori Concorso 2026 brought 72 cars, six world premieres and Helmut Newton to Lake Como. A recap of two days when the weather cleared at exactly the right moment.
On Friday afternoon, 15 May, what hung over Lake Como was what the Lombards politely call una pioggerella — a fine drizzle that would normally take the air out of any open-air event. By Saturday morning the weather had turned. As the gates of Villa del Grumello and Villa Sucota opened, the sun was already low across the water, the stone walls briefly steamed, and what the organisers had titled this year KraftMeister — a tribute to German automotive tradition — received exactly the light it needed.
Anyone who was there knows that Fuori Concorso is not the stage on which to be in a hurry. That is the first and perhaps most important difference from the parallel Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este: there are no classes here, no jury rounds, no fixed schedule. Three villas, a loose loop, two days. If you let the day come to you rather than working through it, you find behind every hedge something everyone will only talk about later.
The theme sounded broad in the announcements. On the lawns it was sharply focused. Porsche brought a block that briefly took the attentive visitor's breath: 908 LH, 917 LH and 962, three endurance icons side by side, plus — placed separately — the 1971 911 2.6 ST as the starting point of an air-cooled programme. Anyone who has ever tried to see these cars individually at a single event knows what it means to have them together in front of you.
Audi played a different note in the gardens of Villa Sucota: a timeline on a single lawn, from the Sport Quattro through the 90 Quattro IMSA GTO and the R18 e-tron quattro to the 2026 Formula 1 car. Past, present and future in twenty metres, without the explanatory-panel routine. Mercedes-Benz placed the 190E 2.5-16 Evo and Evo II next to HWA's modern interpretation — a setup the DTM generation understood instantly, and one that pulled younger visitors into a discussion that continued on Instagram for days.
The cultural anchor of the weekend lay five minutes away. In the gardens of Villa Olmo, the Helmut Newton Foundation opened, together with Larusmiani, the exhibition Helmut Newton — Cars: twenty large-format panels that, for the first time, gather Newton's relationship with the automobile as a body of work in its own right. Photographs spanning more than four decades, from the mid-1950s to 2001, curated by Matthias Harder. Open-air. Accessible by day and evening, from 7am to 11pm, free of charge.
It was the frame on which many visitors hung their day — before or after the villas, with a cappuccino in hand or without. Newton had worked from Lake Como onwards from the 1970s. Villa Olmo was not chosen by chance. The exhibition runs until 30 June. Anyone who didn't see it during the weekend can still catch up. But not in this atmosphere, not with the murmur of the Carrera GTs drifting in from the neighbouring villa.
Six world premieres were counted. The central one stood at Brabus: the BODO Gran Turismo Coupé, which the brand itself describes as a natural evolution — from extreme refinement to coachbuilding in the narrower sense. Anyone familiar with the Brabus line of the last decade recognised the strategic shift immediately. Anyone seeing it for the first time wondered why this car wasn't debuting at Pebble Beach.
Alongside, Gemballa with the Mirage GT on the Porsche Carrera GT base — an extreme tuner statement from 2010 that, in this staging between factory headline cars, gained an unexpected dignity. Koenig Specials beside it. And the Mercedes-Benz 300 CE 6.0 AMG, the Hammer, the car that practically defined eighties tuner culture in the first place. Bizzarrini, as an Italian counterpoint to the German theme, also debuted — a deliberate fracture in the curation that let the lawn breathe.
On the way back across the lake, in the best case, you still see the last pennants of the Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este from the opposite shore. The programme there is stricter, the jury is heard, the BMW 328 took Best of Show this year. It is a different form of car love — institutional, competitive, with clearly assigned roles. Fuori Concorso is the counterpart, not the opponent: no classes, no trophies, no dress-code imperative. Whoever arrives in sneakers is addressed the same way as whoever arrives in a suit. Filtering happens through interest, not appearance.
It is precisely this looseness that we value most about the format. You can drift. You discover something new in every corner — a bar counter next to a 962, a designer mid-conversation about the HWA study, a Newton panel between two hedges that you would otherwise have missed. That is not the effect of perfect choreography. It is the effect of trusting visitors to decide what interests them next.
The number we remember in the end is not 72 (cars) or 6 (premieres) or 16 (automotive partners). It is the number of conversations that happened on the side. Between collectors and constructors. Between students and board members. Between generations that would otherwise attend separate events. A Newton panel as an occasion, a Mirage GT as an excuse, a cappuccino as a pause in between.
These are the moments that social media does not capture. They are the actual content of this format.
To anyone who wasn't there this year: the Newton exhibition at Villa Olmo runs through the end of June. The lawns of Villa del Grumello are meadows again after that, until next spring brings another theme. We suspect that 2027 was already being discussed between two table espressos over the weekend just past. Whoever wants to be there should pencil in May.
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).
