Words: Kris Clewell, Photos: Trevor Woods
Car shows are boring. They're usually anchored in an environment that lacks discovery. You go where the someone tells you. You see what you came to see. Meander around a little bit in an open space. Then you go home. Luftgekühlt is different. You arrive, and the place invites you to wander. Light slips through old factory windows. Brick holds the day’s warmth. Footsteps carry you toward the next corner because there might be something there you did not expect.
This year the hunt moved east. Luftgekühlt 11 took over the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, North Carolina. A one day invasion of air cooled Porsches and the people who orbit them. A new coast and a new crowd, but the same feeling that keeps this thing alive. First time on the Atlantic side. Red brick, steel, water tower, and the Lucky Strike stack cut into a clean sky.
The venue matters. It always does. The entire American Tobacco concept began as a gamble and a grind in 1865. Washington Duke walked 134 miles home from the civil war to a barn full of tobacco leaf and not much else. From there, Durham grew into an industrial engine, and the American Tobacco Company became the machine at its center. Workers moved through rooms that shook with belts and steam. The whistle set the clock for the whole town. Production ended in 1987 and the buildings went quiet before a long rebuild turned the place into a public square again. Same bones. New heartbeat.
Drop an air cooled show into that history and it makes a certain kind of sense. The cars are machines with a pulse. The campus is a monument to work, repurposed for gathering. Luft has always been as much about place as it is about Porsche, and Durham fit like a worn glove. The crowd flowed through alleys and up onto terraces. Sun slid across paint. The baseball field became a stage. Somewhere a kid held a camera with both hands and tried to stop time.
Inside, the curators did what they are best at with Luft. Discoverability. The notion that you stumbled across something. A Carrera Panamericana room with period grit and color. The Jäger orange of a 962 pulls people like a magnet. You could stand there and watch faces cycle through awe into recognition and then into stories.
Durham also gave Luft a theater, and that felt like a turning point. Mobil 1 backed a screening of Relentless, a short film about Betim Berisha and the BBI team building a car to take on Pikes Peak with Jeff Zwart. Twenty minutes cut from years of obsession. Afterward there was a Q and A. That might sound simple. It is not. That is an event growing into culture.
You could feel it in the halls of the old factory. Due to the polish of the campus itself, it did lack a little bit of the juxtaposition of other events, but again, comparison is the thief of joy. That urge to compare this Luft to that one and figure out which was better. We all do it. It is the wrong game. Each Luft is a one off. Place changes everything. For a show built on discovery, sameness would be the real failure. The campus gave the cars a stage that already had a story. The show respected that. It did not try to fight the brick or outshout the stack. It moved with the space, not against it.
There were creature comforts too. Real ones. Food within reach. Shade where it counted. Water flowing through the old channel that once fed industry. Most car shows make you earn your joy with sore feet and dehydration. This one let you keep a little energy for curiosity. That might not sound romantic, but it keeps the day open. You stay an hour longer. You walk one more alley. You find a 356 you would have missed. That last turn is where discovery usually lives.
By late afternoon the light got soft and the bricks breathed out the heat they had taken in all day. After bthe car's and people left, campus stood there the way old buildings do. Unimpressed. Patient. You could imagine the whistle that used to cut the air here and imagine the crowd it called. This time it had called a different kind of worker. Photographers. Writers. Builders. Owners who keep a wrench in the trunk. People who care enough to show up.
Luft did not change the campus, and the campus did not change Luft. They met in the middle. A factory that once made something the world would not quit now hosts a show that sends people home with the urge to keep finding what moves them. You cannot bottle that. You have to go. You have to walk. You have to round the corner and be surprised. That is the point. That is why this one worked. Luft does return to old haunts, but I really hope they continue to challenge themselves, and us, with new locations and experiences. After all, it’s the novel experiences that bring the most joy.
