Why the Concorso d’Eleganza Is the One Car Event Everyone Should See

There is no event like it. Not Pebble Beach, not Goodwood, not the Mille Miglia. Once a year, the shores of Lake Como host something that shouldn’t really work in the modern world — a weekend where a 1937 BMW and a brand-new ALPINA concept share the same lawn, surrounded by people who actually care about both, against a backdrop so absurd in its beauty that the cars themselves look like props in someone else’s dream.

We were there again for 2026, and the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este remains, without qualification, the best car event in the world.

What Lake Como Does To A Car Person

You need to understand the setting before you can understand the event. Lake Como is one of those places that makes you feel like you’re inside a painting that’s slightly too saturated. The water is a particular shade of green-blue that doesn’t have a good name in English. The hills on either side are steep and wooded, with towns clinging to the slopes the way towns only do when they’ve been there for a thousand years. Every curve of the road gives you a different view. It’s the kind of place where you arrive, look around, and immediately feel like you’ve been doing your life slightly wrong.

Villa d’Este sits right on the lake, about an hour north of Milan. It was a cardinal’s residence in the sixteenth century, then a hotel since the 1800s, and now one of those properties that makes the word “hotel” feel inadequate. The gardens are terraced and precise. The interiors are all gilded everything. The dock extends into the lake. When BMW uses Villa d’Este for the Concorso, they take over the grounds, the adjacent Villa Erba, and a stretch of lakefront that most people will only ever see in photographs.

The first time you walk out onto those grounds and see a row of pre-war cars lined up against the lake, you understand why BMW has held this event for nearly three decades. Nothing else would do.

The history Of The Concorso

The Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este dates to 1929, when it was already a gathering for wealthy Europeans to show off coachbuilt machines. It ran on and off through the twentieth century, revived in 1999, and BMW Group took over as the organizing partner in 2005. Helmut Kas, Head of BMW Group Classic is currently the president of the event.

What BMW understood when they took it on is that the Concorso is not a car show. It’s a salon that happens to have cars in it. The judging involves period experts and prominent figures from the automotive world, and even new figures in the car world, like Ronnie Fieg of Kith. The classes are thoughtfully curated by era and coachbuilder. And crucially, the entrants are private collectors bringing real cars on their own trailers, not factory-fresh restorations commissioned for PR purposes.

BMW also uses the Concorso as a reveal stage for concept cars and vision vehicles — something that would look cynical at a lesser event but works here because the surrounding context is so strong. More on that later.

Best of Show: the 1937 BMW 328 “Bugelfalte”

The Trofeo BMW Group — Best of Show — went to a 1937 BMW 328, nicknamed “Bugelfalte” (German for “trouser crease,” referring to the distinctive crease line along its flanks). Its owner, Stefano Martinoli, was awarded the trophy by Kas, Wilhelm Schmid of A. Lange and Sohne, and jury president Lorenzo Ramaciotti.

This is the right car to win. The 328 is not an obscure BMW — it’s the car that announced the brand as a serious force in motorsport before the war, with a lightweight tubular chassis, a 328cc inline-six producing around 80 horsepower in road trim, and a drag coefficient that engineers in the 1940s were still studying. The “Bugelfalte” example is an early car in exceptional condition, and the jury picked it over everything else on those lawns. That’s a statement about what this event values: originality, authenticity, history.

Along with the trophy, Martinoli received a one-of-one A. Lange and Sohne 1815 Chronograph in 18-carat white gold with a hand-engraved Concorso crest on the cuvette. That’s the kind of detail that distinguishes the Concorso from events where Best of Show gets you a ribbon and a photo.

Class Winners Worth Knowing About

Class H produced some of the most interesting cars of the weekend. The class winner was a Volkswagen W12 Nardo from 2000, owned by Gregor Piech — yes, that family — powered by a 5,998cc W12 and bodied as a coupe by Volkswagen itself. It’s a concept car that was actually built and driven, which places it in a different category from most show cars, and its presence here says something about how the Concorso treats the recent past with the same seriousness as the distant one.

Alongside it: a 1971 Lamborghini Miura SV with Bertone coachwork owned by Allan McDonnel, a 1969 DeTomaso Mangusta with Ghia bodywork owned by Thomas Shannon, a 1957 Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta by Zagato from the Collezione Abetone, and a 1958 BMW 507 Convertible owned by John Stafford III. That BMW 507 is worth its own paragraph — only 252 were built, Elvis famously owned one during his military service in Germany, and the example here represents the kind of car that reminds you BMW once made things of staggering beauty before market forces won.

The Trofeo Coppa d’Oro, awarded by public vote, went to a 1963 Mercedes-Benz SL 300 Roadster owned by Eric Blumencranz of the US — reportedly one of the last examples to leave the factory. The public was not wrong.

Two World Premieres

Friday evening brought two reveals, and neither felt out of place. The Vision BMW ALPINA was the first. BMW’s reabsorption of the ALPINA brand has been controversial in enthusiast circles — understandably so, given what independent ALPINA meant for forty-odd years — and this concept is the first real statement of where the brand goes now that it’s fully under the BMW Group umbrella.

But the new concept car was well received by the audience with plenty of patrons ready to write a blank check for it, as confirmed by several BMW executives.

The BMW Motorrad Vision K18 was the second. A six-cylinder inline engine displacing 1,800cc sits at the center of an arrow-shaped touring bike that BMW is calling “Full Force Forward.” The visual concept is “The Heat of Speed,” which reads like marketing language until you see the thing — the engine is genuinely the visual centerpiece of the design rather than something hidden under bodywork. For BMW Motorrad, it’s a reminder that the brand can make something dramatic when it wants to, and the connection to BMW’s straight-six DNA is deliberate and earned rather than decorative.

Kas put it plainly at the event: “Arguably nowhere else in the world can you experience this scenario of a brand-new model among all of these historic vehicles.” He’s right, and that’s exactly why these reveals work here when they would feel like interruptions elsewhere. The motto for 2026 — “Future needs Heritage” — is the kind of line that could easily be empty, but at Villa d’Este it has actual content behind it.

Why There’s Nothing Else Like It

The public days brought the “Amici & Automobili — Wheels & Weisswurst” gathering to Villa Erba, which has become its own fixture: enthusiasts with their own cars mingling with Concorso entrants, the sausages appearing alongside pre-war coachbuilts, the whole thing resisting easy categorization. That’s the Concorso in miniature. It’s too Italian to be German, too German to be Italian, too formal to be a car meet, too loose to be an awards ceremony.

Pebble Beach is more prestigious in the American sense of the word. Goodwood has better racing. The Mille Miglia covers more road. But none of them put you three feet from a 1937 BMW 328 and a new ALPINA concept at the same time, on a terrace above a lake that looks like it was designed specifically to make you feel grateful for being alive, surrounded by people who are there because they actually love cars rather than because they own them.

We’ve been saying this for years. The Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este is the best car event in the world. This year did nothing to change that.