Luigi Chinetti Jr. is 84 years old and he walks slowly. Not cautiously. Not frail. Just slowly. The way someone moves when they've seen a thing so many times that rushing past it would be insulting. And the thing, in this case, was a field full of Ferraris at the 2026 Cavallino Classic. Cars his father helped put on American soil in the first place.
We were there as speedarticle. Also as part of the duPont Registry Group family, alongside Canossa, whose fingerprints are on some of the best driving events happening anywhere right now. But credentials and corporate lineage aren't really the story. The story was the walk.
Luigi Sr. founded the North American Racing Team. He won Le Mans. He became the bridge between Maranello and a country that didn't yet understand what Ferrari meant. That's the textbook version. The version his son tells is different. Less mythology, more kitchen table. He doesn't narrate history. He just remembers stuff. A car that overheated. A hotel in Le Mans that smelled like cigarettes. A phone call from Enzo that lasted two minutes and changed everything. None of it sounds rehearsed because none of it is.
The field itself was stupid good. Ferraris that would make a grown adult forget how to speak. Platinum Award contenders that represent the absolute ceiling of what restoration and authenticity can achieve. Several carried direct provenance back to Chinetti Sr.'s racing campaigns, and standing next to them with his son felt less like a car show and more like visiting someone's family plot. Respectful. A little heavy. Beautiful.
But the cars weren't the thing. The people were the thing.
Luigi kept stopping. Every thirty feet, someone. A collector he'd known for decades. A restorer who'd worked on one of his father's cars. A driver whose name I recognized from results sheets older than me. They'd grab hands, lean in, laugh at something nobody else would understand. These weren't networking moments. They were real. The kind of warmth that only shows up between people who shared rooms and pit lanes and bad weather and long drives and funerals.
It was joyful. It was also a gut punch. Because these people are finite. The first-person witnesses to Ferrari's golden decades are aging out. The stories they carry, the details no book captured, the corrections to the record that only they can make. All of it has an expiration date.
That's the work. Not just making films about beautiful cars. Capturing voices before they go quiet. Luigi alone has a photography archive that could rewrite visual chapters of racing history. Unpublished. Unseen. We intend to do something with it.
Events like Cavallino get called "car shows" and that's technically accurate and completely insufficient. They're reunions. They're living archives. They're the last reliable place where memory and machine still occupy the same physical space. There's more to say about the duPont Registry Group's broader presence at the weekend, about Canossa, about the cars themselves. We'll get to all of it.
But the 2026 Cavallino Classic, for us, comes down to a slow walk across a lawn, an old man's voice unhurried and precise, and the sound of history while it's still talking.
