New Zealand’s Ayrburn Classic is the sort of event that can make a car enthusiast reconsider the geography of his bucket list. For years, the familiar pilgrimage points have been Goodwood, Amelia Island and Pebble Beach—places whose names alone are enough to make collectors start checking airline schedules and wondering whether the household budget really requires a new refrigerator this year. Ayrburn, tucked into the spectacular landscape near Queenstown on New Zealand’s South Island, now deserves a place on that same list.
Billed as a festival of motoring, the Ayrburn Classic is a celebration of automotive heritage, innovation and hospitality. It marked only its second year in February, but has already begun behaving like an event considerably older and more established.
The International Historic Motoring Awards in London offered some confirmation last year, naming the Ayrburn Classic a finalist for its Breakthrough Event of the Year award. Attendance, meanwhile, has quadrupled in two years to more than 9,000 people. Apparently, word travels quickly when interesting cars are involved.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have scenery
The Ayrburn precinct in Arrowtown, just outside Queenstown, is one of those places that seems almost suspiciously well suited to a motoring event. A food-and-wine destination attracting roughly a million visitors each year, it combines excellent bars and restaurants with manicured gardens, clear ponds and a mountain backdrop that looks as though someone in the tourism department has been overusing Photoshop.
Except it really looks like that
It’s an unusually elegant stage for an automobile gathering, and one capable of inviting comparisons with Pebble Beach and Goodwood without immediately regretting them.
And then, naturally, there are the cars
The Ayrburn Classic attracts the sort of machinery that causes otherwise sensible adults to stop in mid-sentence and wander away from their companions. Over three days, the grounds fill with European thoroughbreds, American muscle cars, famous competition machines and even vintage cars powered by aircraft engines—machines that don’t so much start as announce themselves to the surrounding geology.
This year, roughly 500 special vehicles took part in the various displays and judging classes
The festivities began Friday with the Tour d’Elegance, a charity drive through the Wakatipu Basin, followed by a welcome cocktail party. On Saturday, the gates opened for the two-day public motoring showcase, with restoration demonstrations, unveilings of major projects and appearances by cars rarely, if ever, seen in public.
There was also a Crackle Off, in which spectators were treated to the collective mechanical music of the assembled cars. Depending on your point of view, this was either a celebration of internal combustion or an unusually elaborate way of making several thousand people grin at once.
Saturday afternoon brought the Ayrburn Classic Live Auction, with about 40 cars crossing the block
Sunday added Fashions on the Field, along with a presentation on the Dell, one of Ayrburn’s central display areas, where six women brought out their cars and spoke before thousands of visitors about their enthusiasm for motoring. It was another reminder that the collector-car world is at its best when the stories and people matter as much as the machinery.
The weekend culminated with the Ayrburn Classic Awards Ceremony on Sunday afternoon. John and Amber Bellamore’s magnificent red 1957 Ferrari Monza 750 took home the Best in Show Award 2026—a result unlikely to generate many arguments among anyone standing nearby.
Porsche, meanwhile, supplied a considerable portion of the weekend’s temptation
Among the standouts were a 911 (Type 996) GT2 Clubsport and GT3 RS, a 356 A Outlaw, a Carrera GT and the exceedingly rare 918 Spyder. It was the sort of Porsche lineup that makes you wish you’d brought more camera memory, more time and perhaps a more accommodating bank manager.
For Paape, Porsche is more than another important marque on the concours field. It is part of the family history. His father brought home the tenth Porsche to arrive in New Zealand, while his wife drove the eighth 356 to reach the country. Between them runs a remarkable thread of Porsche history in the southern hemisphere, and it helps explain why the marque occupies such a natural and prominent place at Ayrburn.
That personal connection also says something important about the event itself
The best classic-car gatherings are never merely collections of expensive machinery arranged neatly on grass. Cars alone can fill a field, but stories are what give the field life. The great events combine remarkable automobiles with interesting owners, restorers, racers and enthusiasts—and provide a setting where people have enough time to stand around and talk about them.
Ayrburn appears to have figured this out remarkably quickly.
For Porsche enthusiasts and classic-car devotees around the world, the Ayrburn Classic is a name worth remembering. Set amid some of the South Island’s most spectacular scenery and driven by genuine enthusiasm for the automobile, it is rapidly establishing itself among the upper tier of international motoring festivals.
And if you’ve always wanted an excuse to visit New Zealand, a Ferrari Monza, a Carrera GT, a few aircraft-engined vintage cars and a glass of local wine against a backdrop of mountains seems like a fairly convincing one.
Above contents © 2026 Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG reviewed and edited by Rex McAfee , @rexmcafee 🏁
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