Porsche Night of Champions

The flight to Frankfurt was fairly non-eventful, although the weather in Detroit, where I connected, was a bit dicey as 50mph gusts had the plane dancing a bit as we approached the airport. Caught the flick “Inglorious Basterds” on the way. Awesome flick.

Frankfurt was raining and blustery cold upon arrival. I had reserved a car at Hertz, a BMW 118D in particular, but found that they didn’t have it available and instead was given the keys to the Mercedes Benz A-Class Diesel. Anyway, I had to hurry down to Stuttgart to catch a factory tour that was about to start in 2 hours.

The drive to Stuttgart was a bit challenging due to the weather, but made more challenging due to the A-Class’s lack of acceleration at highway speeds. As we all know, certain portions of the highway in Germany do not have speed limits and in order to pass slower moving vehicles, one must pass on the left and pass at a high rate of speed because there invariably will be a 7-Series or a S-Class doing at least buck fifty or more closing on your behind.

I finally arrived in Stuttgart, into the hotel Porsche had arranged for its guests. The hotel, Abacco, has a motorsport/automotive theme and each room is decorated with some type of memorabilia or design cue conveying its theme. That was cool.

Fast forward to the Awards Night: Had a brief tour of Porsche’s motorsports operations and we were later shuttled to Porsche’s new museum. This museum is impressive in both its contents as well as its architecture. All the visitors are led to the museum’s display area via Europe’s longest escalator.

And of course, there are many historic vehicles displayed throughout the venue.

There were many luminaries in attendance, including Dr. Wolfgang Porsche, and many factory drivers as well.

The show itself was rehearsed for a week and exemplified German attention to detail to the fullest.

It was truly amazing to observe such a relatively small automotive company create so much value through a near maniacal attention to detail and tenacious will to bring to market the best product possible. They are the NY Yankees of the car world; they are willing to pay the price to be the best, all the time. That was really cool to see.

The US winners (Bob Faieta and Melanie Snow) in the GT3 Cup were honored. They, of course, run our tires, the Yokohama ENV-R1 race slick.

Throughout the night, I caught up with many familiar faces as well as made new friends from different parts of the world. Back at the hotel, we continued our festive moods well into the night, fast approaching dawn.

I’d like to say a special thanks to Paul Ritchie, President of Porsche Motorsports North America, for extending the invite to us and allowing us to participate in such an exclusive event. This was a truly memorable event and hopefully will be one of many in the future.