Concorso d’Eleganze Villa d’Este 2013 – Event Recap

Earlier this year I was invited by A. Lange & Söhne to visit the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, in Italy. The Concorso d’Eleganza is one of the most prestigious classic car events in the world. Although I’m no total petrol head, I said yes and enjoyed a most wonderful trip and relished the sight of magnificent automobiles. I prepared for you a short and sweet event recap, with many photos of the most wonderful historic cars.

The Concorso d’Eleganza is an the elegance competition for classic and vintage cars, and it takes place in and around the beautiful Villa d’Este, on the shores of Lake Como in Italy. It has been organized every single year, since 1929! Well, the Italians love beautiful cars. For the past ten years BMW is part of the organization and this year they introduced us on a new concept car, which was developed together with Pininfarina: the BMW Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coupe.

This press photo makes the car look much better than on my photos. But I will share 30+ photos of classic and vintage cars, which I made during the event. We were transported from our hotel to Grand Hotel Villa d’Este, where the event was, in some splendid Riva and J.Craft speed boats. Here’s a photo of one of our ‘water taxi’s’ for those days.

That’s what we call ‘in style’, but actually the entire event was in style and simply brilliant. At first, I was just blown away by the vast amount of über-impressive cars. When I saw these words, my day was already good and it had just started…

A. Lange & Söhne organized a very nice cocktail party and dinner for their guests. Somehow being in a scenery like on the shores of Lake Como, immediately puts you in the right mind-set.

The cocktail party was about to start….

…and afterward, before the first course was served, Wilhelm Schmid welcomed his guests and spoke about a unique timepiece that was made for the winner of the event. In our previous posts (see here) we already covered the beautiful Lange 1 Timezone pièce unique for Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este. When A. Lange & Söhne partnered with the Concorso for the first time, in 2012, we explained more about the unique version of the Lange 1 Timezone that is made specially for the winner of the event (see here for that article). Mister Schmid also talked about the similarities between cars and watches. Both are driven by mechanics and both need to be serviced from time to time. The big difference is that your watch probably runs more ‘miles’ than your car, before you sent it for service.

It would simply take too much of your time to explain everything about the cars on show, however this one (see below) caught lots of attention. Probably because it’s one of two remaining pieces, and probably the name of the owner also contributed to the attention for this vehicle. The owner owns a fashion brand and now-a-days also a watch brand that is part of the Richemont group.

The owner of this car, mister Ralph Lauren, won the first prize at this year’s Concorso d’Eleganza. Unfortunately I cannot show you a photo of the winner with his new Lange 1 Timezone on his wrist.

And now on to the photos of the cars…