The seventh edition of Fuoriconcorso, taking place on the 16th and 17th of May, will differ significantly from last year's. Where the Milanese fashion house Larusmiani and its automotive partners once paid homage to the sun-soaked heritage of their home country, it is now the turn of Teutonic masterpieces to reflect the light on the lawn of Villa del Grumello. Rennsilber replaces Rosso Corsa, and with it comes a celebration of the engineering rigour, motorsport obsession and often Bauhaus-inflected design clarity that made the automobile's motherland a creative force unlike any other.
If last year's edition demonstrated how much passion and beauty Italy has contributed to the story of the automobile, KraftMeister now invites its audience to reckon with an equally rich legacy. The gardens of Villa del Grumello, where the scent of Mediterranean flora mingles with the faint trace of racing fuel, remain the perfect setting for this kind of conversation. It is what makes Fuoriconcorso one of the most stylish and impeccably curated events in the entire calendar and an undisputed highlight of Como Car Week.
140 Years of the Three-Pointed Star
Most of the cars in attendance will span the full breadth of German automotive excellence, with Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, BMW and Audi/VW forming the core pillars of the exhibition. And what better occasion than the 140th anniversary of the world's oldest still-active carmaker to consecrate Italian soil to the Mercedes-Benz legacy? The Stuttgart giant will present more than a dozen cars, opening with the 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen—the very nucleus of our collective passion—and building through the decades with icons like the 1928 SSK, the 1955 300 SLR and the breathtaking Mercedes-AMG One.
But the Private Lawn holds its own surprises for those who came of age in the eighties. Alongside a 190 E 2.5-16 EVO2 and its full-blooded DTM racing sibling, a radical reinterpretation of the W201 theme will make its Como Car Week debut: 500 horsepower, a V6 engine, and a production run of just one hundred examples. It was developed by HWA, the racing specialist based in Affalterbach that has been deeply embedded in Mercedes motorsport programs since its foundation in 1998.
Four Rings and the Flat Six
Audi maps its technological trajectory through the prism of competition, tracing an arc from the 1984 Sport quattro, whose short wheelbase and revolutionary all-wheel drive system redefined the very nature of Group B rallying, through the ferocious 1989 90 quattro IMSA GTO, to the hybrid ingenuity of the 2013 R18 e-tron quattro. That evolution finds its logical destination in the 2026 R26 Formula 1 car and the new RS 5: the first plug-in hybrid in the history of Audi Sport.
Porsche, a cornerstone of the event since its very first edition, returns this year with a focus on mechanical purity in the 911 Air-Cooled Pavilion. The celebration of the flat-six's unique architecture reaches its zenith with the 1971 Porsche 911 2.6 ST in its psychedelic Shell livery and the 911 964 RSR, a car that wrote its name into the folklore of the Nürburgring and Spa with the quiet authority of a true endurance legend.
Outlaws and Visionaries
The HWA EVO will not be the only restomod gracing the lawns of Villa del Grumello. An exquisitely curated selection awaits, one that, for a change, reaches beyond German borders: the Eccentrica V12 "Titano", a thoroughly modern reimagining of the Lamborghini Diablo, promises to be among the most talked-about presences of the weekend. Germany was the unrivalled European champion of high-end tuning in the eighties and nineties, and KraftMeister pays proper tribute to that era of glorious excess with the Ferrari-based Koenig Specials, a Gemballa Mirage GT and a Mercedes 300 CE 6.0 by AMG. The concept cars Maybach Exelero and BMW Vision EfficientDynamics lend the event its necessary dose of the experimental and the visionary, proof that German automobiles have always been as much about creativity as they are about speed and precision.
Helmut Newton at the Lake
As a fitting artistic complement to the weekend, the exhibition "Helmut Newton. Cars." at Villa Olmo (running from May 15th to June 30th) will explore the automobile through the lens of one of photography's great provocateurs. It is a fitting artistic layer to the weekend, ensuring that KraftMeister will more than do justice to the German automotive heritage. We at Classic Driver are proud to support our friends at Fuoriconcorso as the headline media partner since the very beginning — and we cannot wait to see all the magnificent cars made in Germany they will line up on 16-17 May 2026 on the shores of Lake Como.
