Monterey Car Week has a rhythm to it. Early mornings on damp grass, judges with clipboards, lawn chairs, nice suits or dresses, and coffee. The Monterey Motorsports Festival is not that, and thank goodness for it. On Saturday, August 15, the event swallowed the entire Monterey County Fairgrounds and turned it into something loud, young, and genuinely fun. Most importantly, something different.
You could hear it before you saw it. Cars arrived revving, popping, and generally showing off, and nobody in line seemed to mind. That set the tone for the whole night. Every corner of the fairgrounds had something parked in it, and the crowd moved between displays from the afternoon until the music started.
The variety was the best part. Supercars sat within walking distance of JDM heroes, and neither felt out of place. The Lotec Sirius even made an appearance. For me, one of the most interesting automotive attendees was a car built from the ground up by a young engineer who goes by DeSimone, which is exactly the kind of thing that gets lost at more buttoned-up shows and exactly the kind of thing this crowd stops to talk about. Personally, I genuinely enjoyed my chat with the creator and can't wait to see what he builds next.
And it was that chat that made me really fall in love with the event. This car was placed around a group of others in an area only accessible by walking through an entryway, like an area waiting to be discovered, as if I was playing a video game. Once there, I realized the entirety of the event was built like this and had so much for me to find. So, from there I went off and walked the grounds to see all the incredible cars on display around every corner.
If you have spent any time in one of those open-world driving games where the whole map is a festival and every car is welcome, you already know the feeling. Except this one had real noise, real cars, and real people. It should be noted there was most definitely zero racing to be had.
Once the sun went down, the main stage took over with an impressive music lineup for a giant crowd. David J opened at 7:00, Dreya V followed at 7:45, me n ü came on at 8:45, and Sidequest closed the night at 9:45. By that point, the fairgrounds had stopped being a car show entirely and become an automotive festival unlike any other.
Paolo Manca, Founder & CEO of the event, says: “With 450 cars on display, we increased tremendously versus 2025 when the cars were 300. Our 6,000 visitors could enjoy a real car-party where supercars and music mingle for an unstoppable experience.”
duPont REGISTRY came in as a partner of the festival, and the arrival was hard to miss. The team arrived at the fairgrounds in five supercars, which were part of a giant 50-car parade, and parked directly in front of the stage, which meant that for the rest of the day, every piece of programming had a proper backdrop.
This fourfold partnership, MMF-dPR-Concorso-Pininfarina, holds the signature of Raffaello Porro, MMF’s communication advisor and ambassador in Europe. He also introduced Alberto Scuro, president of FIVA and ASI, alongside Massimo Carnelos, General Counsel of Italy in San Francisco, for their opening remarks.
On the Peyton Stage, Basem Wasef ran the show as emcee. Wasef contributes to duPont REGISTRY magazine and knows how to keep an audience with him, which matters when you are competing with exhaust notes fifty feet away. He welcomed a long list of guests over the course of the day, among them duPont REGISTRY Editor-in-Chief Charles Bradley.
Bradley presented the 2026 Editor's Choice Award to Luca Betti, the former rally driver who founded Kimera Automobili, for the Kimera K39. The car made its public debut at the festival, which made the timing about as good as it gets.
Betti's background matters here. Kimera is not a design house doing a styling exercise; it is a shop run by someone who spent his career competing, and the cars reflect that. Handing the award to him with the K39 sitting there in front of the stage on its first day out in public was one of those moments where the programming and the metal lined up perfectly.
Later on, Wasef hosted a roundtable that pulled together Cristina Cheever, Chief Marketing Officer of duPont REGISTRY Group, Charles Bradley, Editor-in-Chief of duPont REGISTRY, and Eric Curran, President of Sales at duPont REGISTRY Select. Four people who look at this industry from very different angles, talking in front of an audience that had spent the day surrounded by the cars in question.
More intimate was the conversation between Charles Bradley and Harald and Fredrik Skjoldt, father and son, the first president of the Lamborghini Club Norway and good friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the second a former skijoring champion, both successful businessmen with a deep passion for collectible cars.
It is a good format for an event like this. No slides, no script, just a conversation about where the market is going and what people are actually buying, delivered to a crowd that ranged from lifelong collectors to people who had never been to Car Week before.
Plenty of Monterey Car Week events are excellent at what they do, and they all typically follow a similar vibe. The Monterey Motorsports Festival went the other direction. It felt like a true automotive festival meant for all. With music, food, noise, and a fairground teeming with excitement, Monterey Motorsports Festival is exactly what MCW needs: a breath of electrifying air.
We want to thank Raffaello Porro for bringing this opportunity to duPont REGISTRY Group and making the introduction that led to the partnership. He recognized the fit early, and he was right about it. Expanding our experiential presence has been a priority for us, and that means meeting enthusiasts and collectors where they actually gather rather than reaching them only through a screen. A festival built around open access and a genuinely mixed field is exactly the kind of environment we have been looking for.
