Time to Homologate

You don’t walk past a CLK GTR. You step back.

That’s the only honest reaction to what greeted me at the entrance of the Drivers and Business Club on a Saturday morning in late May. The silver CLK GTR belongs to the LOH Collection — a museum piece, sitting in the open air. Beside it, a Ferrari F40 in full LM specification. A Maserati MC12 in race livery. A yellow Diablo GT with its doors raised. A McLaren F1. And the one I kept circling back to: a Porsche 935, the Group 5 silhouette monster, drenched in Marlboro and Warsteiner colours, sitting on white BBS centre-locks.

No barriers. No rope. No security hovering. You could stand close enough to read the tyre markings, close enough to see your own reflection warp across a flank that once cut through Le Mans air at full chat. These are cars that usually live behind glass, and here they were on bare concrete, left out for people to simply appreciate. I took a step back first — to take in the whole collection someone had assembled — then walked in close, the way you do when you can’t quite believe it’s allowed.

The Field Opens Up

Past the entrance, the field opens up. An orange Miura on gold wheels. A McLaren P1 in near-black, parked on dry grass like a daily driver. A Gumpert Apollo with its doors flung skyward. And — because this is the kind of event it is — a helicopter sitting on the lawn, HTM lettering on the tail, brought in by Helicopter Travel Munich as though arriving by air were the most natural thing in the world.

Two cars stopped me longest. The first was an Aston Martin DB5, fitted with the gadgets — the number plates rotate, there’s a smoke machine. Bond’s car, working as intended, parked on a Munich lawn with nobody minding it. The second was the Aston Martin Valhalla, and its paint did something I’ve never seen done well. It begins as a deep red shot through with metalflake, sparkling in the midday sun, then dissolves — gradually, deliberately — into naked carbon fibre. The transition is so clean it reads like the car is mid-thought, half-finished on purpose.

The Quieter Lawn

A second lawn held the quieter statements. This is where Eccentrica had brought the Heritage Rose Phoenix, and Totem the GT Super — both coachbuilt, both reinterpretations of icons rather than copies of them. Near them, a Porsche painted for the dirt: a Dakar-style 911, roof rack loaded, the kind of car built to be driven somewhere difficult rather than admired somewhere comfortable. Classic cars filled in around them, unhurried, the way old friends stand at the edge of a party.

Time to Homologate

This year’s edition had a name: Time to Homologate. It’s a quiet joke that only makes sense once you’ve seen the entrance — because nearly every showpiece out front was a homologation special, a road car that existed only so a race car could be born. The F40 LM, the 935, the CLK GTR, the MC12. Cars built to satisfy a rulebook, now worth more than the championships they were made to enter.

It’s still a concours, for all its refusal to behave like one. There’s a jury, and this year it carried real weight: JP, CEO of Classic Driver, alongside Laura Kukuk, the engineer who judges at Villa d’Este; her husband Niclas Kukuk; and Rotenda Nevhutalu, a designer at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. Names you’d expect at Lake Como, standing on a Munich lawn deciding which car was the coolest. Not the most original, not the most valuable, not the most correct. The coolest.

That word does a lot of work here, and the jury seemed to understand it. Coolness isn’t measured in matching numbers or documentation folders. It’s the F40 LM that still wears its scars. It’s a paint finish nobody can explain. It’s whether a car makes you stop walking.

I stopped a lot.