Vegas AUTOFEST is both on purpose, and getting there took three years and two deliberate changes of shape. It is worth writing down how, because the path from a club event to a community one is not obvious while you are walking it.
2017, a concours
It started as a small concours put on by the Porsche Club.
A concours is a specific thing. Cars are judged, usually against a standard of originality and condition, usually within a single marque, and the people who enter are people who already know the rules. It is an excellent format and it is a closed one by design. The audience is the entrants and the entrants are the audience.
It worked. It also had a ceiling built into it, and the ceiling was not the venue or the budget. It was the definition.
If your event is for owners of one make of car who want their car assessed, the number of people who can want what you are offering is fixed before you start.
2018, independent
The second year it became an independent show rather than a club event.
That sounds administrative. It was not. Dropping the single marque requirement changes who can show up, and when you change who can show up you change what the day is.
A Porsche next to a Porsche is a comparison. A Porsche next to a lowered truck somebody built in their garage is a conversation. The second is more interesting to stand near, and it is more interesting for the owners of both cars.
What we noticed that year is that the crowd had become more varied than the format was built for. People were coming who had never entered anything, who did not know what a concours was, who had just heard there were going to be good cars somewhere and came to look.
That is a signal worth paying attention to. The audience had outgrown the structure.
2019, a name
So this year it becomes Vegas AUTOFEST, and the naming is the point rather than a cosmetic exercise.
A club event is for members. An independent show is for whoever finds out about it. A named event with its own identity is for anyone who sees the name and thinks that sounds like something I would like.
The name is permission. It tells somebody who does not own a show car, does not know anybody, and has never been to a car event that there is nothing to qualify for. That message cannot be carried by a club's name no matter how open the club is being, because the club's name says who it belongs to.
That is what we mean by community driven. Not a marketing phrase. A statement about who decides what the event becomes, which from here is the people who turn up rather than a committee working out a judging schedule.
The exclusive part, and why it stays
Here is where it would be easy to get this wrong in the other direction.
Opening an event up does not mean making it generic. The setting matters enormously, and we have deliberately kept the show in a space that most people do not get to spend a day in.
There are three reasons for that, and only one of them is about prestige.
The first is that the cars deserve it. A collection of genuinely good cars on an anonymous parking lot looks like a parking lot. The same cars somewhere with room and a view look like an event, and the owners who spent the winter getting a car ready can tell the difference immediately.
The second is that it makes the day an occasion rather than an errand. People dress differently, behave differently and stay longer when the setting signals that something is happening. That is worth more than any amount of programming.
The third is the one I care most about. A space that normally has a gate in front of it, opened to anybody who wants to come, is a different experience than a space that was always open. The contrast is the gift. Taking somewhere exclusive and making it available is more generous than booking somewhere nobody was excluded from in the first place.
Which is why the show stays at Red Rock Country Club. A private club is not an obvious home for an event whose entire pitch is that anyone can come, and that tension is the point rather than a problem to resolve. Most people in this city have never driven through those gates. For one day they can.
Inclusively available at an exclusive space. The two halves need each other. Drop the first and it is a private event. Drop the second and it is a car park with cars in it.
What this asks of us
A format like that has obligations, and they are mostly about what you do not do.
You do not build a hierarchy into the day. The moment there is a visible tier of people who matter more, everybody below that line understands their position and the inclusive part is gone, whatever the website says.
You do not let a single kind of car dominate so thoroughly that everything else reads as filler. Variety is the product. A show where one marque owns the best ground has quietly become a club event again with extra steps.
And you do not assume people know how any of this works. Somebody attending their first car show should be able to work out where to go, what is happening and whether they are allowed to walk up to a car and look at it, without having to ask. Most car events fail this badly, and they fail it by forgetting that the rules they absorbed over twenty years are invisible to a newcomer.
Why cars
A fair question, given that the stated goal is community rather than horsepower.
Cars are one of the few remaining things that reliably get strangers talking to each other in person. Somebody stands next to a car, somebody else stands next to the same car, and a conversation starts that would not have started anywhere else. It crosses age, background and income in a way that very little else does, because the object is doing the introducing.
That is the actual product. The cars are the reason people come and the excuse for the thing that makes them stay.
Where we are
Three years from a club concours to this, and the next part is not ours to decide.
Community driven means what it says. What this becomes depends on who comes, what they bring, and what they want more of, and our job from here is to keep the gate open and stay out of the way of the thing forming inside it.
Details, as they firm up, are on the site.