Newport and the Gilded Age of Motoring: The Audrain Concours and Why It Matters
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Quick Takeaways
- The Audrain Newport Concours and Motor Week runs October 1-4, 2026, culminating with the Concours d'Elegance at Fort Adams State Park on Sunday, October 4.
- In just seven years, the event has been recognized as Motoring Event of the Year by the International Historic Motoring Awards — a remarkable achievement for a relatively young concours.
- More than 180 historically significant automobiles will compete at Fort Adams, with Newport's Gilded Age mansions providing one of the most distinctive concours settings in the United States.
- 2026 introduces the inaugural Audrain Supercar Concours on Saturday October 3, recognizing the growing collector interest in modern performance machinery alongside traditional classics.
The Right Setting
The relationship between Newport and extravagance goes back well before the automobile existed. The Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Belmonts built their summer cottages — a word applied with considerable irony to structures containing dozens of rooms — along Bellevue Avenue in the late nineteenth century. Newport was where American wealth displayed itself, and it did so with a seriousness of purpose that the robber baron era brought to most things.
It is, then, a natural setting for a concours. The automobiles that compete at the Audrain Newport event — prewar American machines, European exotics, racing machinery, coachbuilt grand tourers — are the direct successors of that same tradition. They represent, in their respective eras, what it meant to have resources and apply them to the problem of the finest possible automobile. Placing them in front of the Breakers or along the approaches to Marble House is not mere staging. It is the logical continuation of a very long conversation about what excellence looks like.
Seven Years to the Top
The Audrain Newport Concours was founded in 2019, which makes its recognition as Motoring Event of the Year by the International Historic Motoring Awards — received just three years after a Rising Star Award from the same organization — a genuinely impressive trajectory. Building a concours with serious collector and curator credibility takes time. Newport managed it quickly, partly because of the quality of the setting, partly because the Audrain Automobile Museum provided an institutional foundation, and partly because the event's organizers understood from the outset that a concours is not simply a car show with better parking.
The 2026 edition adds the inaugural Supercar Concours on Saturday October 3, where more than 75 of the rarest performance automobiles of the past three decades will be judged at Fort Adams. It's a recognition that the collector car world has expanded, and that the machinery coming out of McLaren, Pagani, and Bugatti in the 2000s and 2010s is now old enough to be taken seriously as a collecting category.
The Automobiles That Belong There
Fort Adams on a Sunday in October, with the Atlantic visible beyond the field and 180 historically significant automobiles arranged in class order, is one of the finer experiences the American concours calendar offers. The automobiles that compete there represent the full range of the collector world — automobiles like the 1929 Duesenberg J/SJ in the Concours Photo Art American Icons collection, which was the kind of machine Newport's original summer residents would have recognized as appropriate, and automobiles like the 1962 Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato, which represents the postwar British tradition at its most focused and purposeful.
These are not automobiles that need explanation in Newport. They are automobiles that the setting understands.
Bottom Line
Newport built its reputation as a setting for the finest things Americans could acquire. The Audrain Concours simply added automobiles to the list. In seven years, it has become one of the events that serious collectors mark on their calendars early. The field at Fort Adams this October will confirm why.
Automobiles like the Duesenberg J/SJ and the Aston Martin DB4GT Zagato are available as collector prints in our American Icons and British Classics series.
