Coastal Classics at the Audrain Tour d’Elegance

Newport, Rhode Island turns into an open-air museum each fall when the Audrain Newport Concours & Motor Week rolls into town. Since 2019, this New England seaside enclave has played host to a festival that blends the romance of automotive history with the buzz of a modern gathering. There are owner meet-ups, seminars with industry luminaries, and even an auction featuring significant machines. But the heartbeat of the week belongs to two headline moments: Saturday’s Tour d’Elegance and the grand Sunday finale, the Concours d’Elegance.

The Tour d’Elegance is Newport at its most cinematic. More than a hundred cars—from pre-war legends to contemporary coachbuilt masterpieces—line up at dawn, ready to stretch their legs. This year’s route began at Second Beach, traced the sweep of Ocean Drive with its rugged coastline and Gilded Age mansions, and finished on Bellevue Avenue, where the public could mingle with drivers and pore over sheet metal that rarely ventures far from climate-controlled garages. It is a rolling celebration of motion, design, and the people who keep these stories on the road.

I joined the tour from the passenger seat with an unusual assignment: navigator to A. Lange & Söhne CEO Wilhelm Schmid. The German watchmaker serves as the event’s title sponsor, and it felt fitting to be in a car that shares the brand’s devotion to precision—an elegant Champagne Yellow 1963 Porsche 356B Cabriolet. We slipped out into the cool coastal air just after sunrise, the flat-four humming, canvas top neatly folded, the Atlantic glinting blue beyond low stone walls.

Driving in a convoy of significant cars is a sensory experience. There is the mechanical symphony—inline-sixes singing, V8s pulsing low, the occasional purposeful cough of a carbureted start. Salt air mingles with the faint perfume of old leather and warmed oil. Locals wave from porches, cyclists pull to the side to watch, and families gather on sidewalks, phones in hand, as the procession rumples past. You spot a pre-war grand tourer bristling with brass, followed by a mid-century Italian coupe cut like a suit, followed by a modern hypercar with a startlingly quiet, surgical idle. It is a timeline of the automobile, told in motion.

The 356B, light and communicative, felt utterly at home here. On Ocean Drive, the road curves in a rhythm that rewards balance and patience rather than outright speed. The car’s modest power encourages you to savor momentum, to choose lines carefully, to listen to what the chassis has to say. As navigator, I watched the route and the flow, but I also watched the faces as we passed—smiles, nods, a few spontaneous cheers. The Tour brings rare automobiles into the everyday world, and that exchange is the magic: these cars belong on roads, not just lawns.

Between waypoints, the conversation naturally turned to craft. Schmid spoke about the parallels between watchmaking and classic motoring: precision elevated by handwork, beauty grounded in function, and an ethos of stewardship that values preservation through use. Whether it’s a movement adjusted to the finest tolerances or an engine tuned by ear, both disciplines are ultimately about time—measuring it, keeping it, and honoring the eras that shaped us. It’s easy to see why a high horology house would champion an event that asks owners to drive, not just display.

The Tour unfolded at a measured pace, with brief moments of regrouping that let the field bunch back together. The view was a shifting collage: the silver ribbon of road along the water, the crisp white trim of weathered shingle houses, flashes of headlamps and polished grilles catching the morning sun. By the time we reached Bellevue Avenue, that collage became a tableau. Cars fanned out, hoods popped, and conversations sparked—owners sharing restoration tales, old friends greeting each other across fenders, curious newcomers leaning in to learn the difference between a survivor and a nut-and-bolt restoration.

If Saturday is the narrative—a living, breathing story arc—then Sunday’s Concours is the epilogue written in immaculate script. Judges pore over details, histories are weighed, and awards are bestowed. Yet it is the Tour that gives the Concours its soul. Seeing these machines in motion, hearing them, smelling them—this is how memory imprints. Even after the trophies are handed out and the lawn empties, the sound of a vintage engine turning over at first light tends to linger.

For those who follow both watches and cars, the weekend also offers a rare confluence. On wrists, as under hoods, excellence is measured in the quiet confidence of execution. The Tour d’Elegance, with its open roads and open conversations, made that connection tangible. It’s an invitation to engage: ask a question, share a story, take a closer look. Whether you come for the concours lawn or the coastal drive, you leave with the same impression—that heritage isn’t static. It moves.