The Only Thing Worse Than Missing Out Is Staying Home
Desert dust or champagne on a lake. A French field full of beautiful mistakes. A Mexican highway at two in the morning. The locations could not be more different, the cars could not be more varied, and yet every single story this week is really about the same thing: what happens to a person when they decide that being there matters more than being comfortable.
This week on the Sunday Pitstop, we are pointing you somewhere. A Mojave desert campout that will rearrange your priorities. A lakeside concours that will make you question what beauty even means. A French field where a century of magnificent stubbornness put on its finest show. A Mexican peninsula that will test everything you think you believe in.
Pick one. Book the ticket. Pack light and show up ready for anything. The only mistake you can make this year is staying home.
Not for the Faint of Heart
The desert will do something to you. Pioneertown crawls out of the Joshua Tree wasteland like a fever dream conjured by Roy Rogers himself, and once a year AETHER Apparel descends upon it with 300 similarly afflicted souls who cannot seem to stay on pavement or out of trouble.
For two hundred dollars you get fed, watered, and thoroughly corrupted. Electric dirtbikes that produce ungodly torque will throw you into the sand before you understand what happened. Vintage Porsches snake through Box Canyon like something out of a hallucination. The Red Dog Saloon will separate you from your sobriety and your sleep schedule simultaneously.
Everyone here is a little unhinged in the best possible way. Photographers, factory racing drivers, venture capitalists, all of them covered in desert dust and grinning like idiots.
The 9th Annual Rally runs May 15 to 17, 2026. You have been warned. Go anyway.
Champagne Combustion and the Beautiful Machines of Lake Como
Lake Como will make you question your entire life. The sun fractures across the water and suddenly a 1937 Bugatti is rolling past you and waiters are materializing from nowhere with champagne and you genuinely cannot tell if any of this is real.
The Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este is what happens when obscene wealth collides with genuine passion and somehow produces something worth believing in. Pre-war Bugattis sharing gravel with Maserati MC12s. A Lamborghini Countach prowling the grounds with its doors stabbing skyward like it owns the place. An Aston Martin Bulldog from the 1980s winning the public vote by sheer force of personality.
Everyone here is drunk on something, whether champagne or beauty or both, and nobody is apologizing for it.
This is not a car show. This is a religious experience with better food. You need to go.
The French have always built cars the way other people build manifestos, with total conviction and absolutely no interest in your opinion. Citroën has been doing this for a hundred years and they threw themselves a party worthy of the legacy.
Twenty thousand people descended on La Ferté-Vidame, the very field where the 2CV was secretly tested in the 1940s, because of course they tested it in secret. Five thousand Citroëns materialized from across the continent. The usually classified test track was opened to owners who puttered across the same pavé that engineers have been torturing prototypes on for decades.
Three TPV prototypes, the strange little ancestors of the 2CV, emerged from the Conservatoire collection. De Gaulle's DS limousine sat there radiating impossible elegance. A rotary engined helicopter reminded everyone that Citroën once looked at conventional engineering and simply refused.
This is what a century of magnificent stubbornness looks like. It is not to be missed.
Baja California will test your commitment to absolutely everything you thought you believed in. Five days of potholed highway at 120 miles per hour, chasing a 1969 Hugger Orange Jeep Commando through the Mexican desert while mariachi music bleeds into the sound of angle grinders at two in the morning.
The NORRA 1000 calls itself the happiest race on earth. That is either a profound truth or a spectacular lie, depending on which hour you catch it.
Nobody here is winning money. Most people have never heard of this race and never will. What they are doing is finishing, and in Baja that turns out to be everything.
Every night Alex Earle would swap racing goggles for reading glasses and lie in the dirt with a headlamp, making the old Jeep whole again. It broke catastrophically anyway. They fixed it anyway. They finished anyway.
