Luftgekühlt 12 Brings 300 Air-Cooled Porsches — and a Le Mans-Winning 935 — to Atlanta
Porsche’s air-cooled festival made its Georgia debut at Town at Trilith with 300 cars, 8,000 fans, and the Kremer 935 K3 that won Le Mans in 1979 — hours after its owners bought it.
Luftgekühlt, the curated air-cooled Porsche show that started in a Los Angeles parking lot in 2014, held its 12th U.S. edition on October 10 at Town at Trilith, south of Atlanta. Porsche says 8,000 fans turned out to see 300 cars, even after hurricane warnings forced organizers to push the start back by several hours. It's the second major Porsche heritage gathering in the U.S. this month, after the Porsche Classic Restoration Challenge finalists were named on October 9.
Atlanta wasn't a random pick. Porsche Cars North America has been headquartered there since 1998, and the 2026 Luft fell in a year when U.S. 911 sales are up 33% even as global deliveries fall. Luft co-founder Patrick Long, a two-time Le Mans class winner, and creative director Howie Idelson have built the show around moving to a new city each time, with a new theme and a hand-picked field: every owner applies with a history and photos, and the team reads every entry.
The hero car bought hours before Le Mans
This year's headline theme was 50 years of the Porsche 935, the turbocharged, silhouette-class 911 that dominated sports car racing in the late 1970s. Luft assembled three yellow 935s raced by brothers Don and Bill Whittington, plus a 935 from the Brumos collection. The centerpiece was the Kremer-built 935 K3 that won the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans outright with the Whittingtons and Klaus Ludwig at the wheel.
The Atlanta connection is direct. Around the time they won Le Mans, the Whittingtons bought Road Atlanta, the Georgia circuit that still hosts Petit Le Mans every fall. According to the Revs Institute, the brothers bought the K3 from Kremer Racing just hours before the 1979 race started, then survived a roadside belt repair on the Mulsanne Straight that cost them about 75 minutes. Porsche describes the K3 as the first rear-engined car to win Le Mans overall.
Seventy years since the first Targa Florio win
The second theme marked Porsche's first victory in the Targa Florio, the Sicilian open-road race run from 1906 to 1977. Umberto Maglioli won it solo in 1956 in a 550 A Spyder, the first of 11 Porsche wins, more than any other manufacturer managed in the race's 71-year history. The race also lent its name to the 1965 911 Targa, whose fixed roll bar was Porsche's answer to U.S. concerns about convertible safety.
Four cars told that story: a 1959 718 RSK that set the fastest lap and led most of the race before a suspension failure on the final lap, the RS 60 that won in 1960, the 904 Carrera GTS that won in 1964, and a 1971 908/3 built specifically for the Targa and the Nürburgring.
A McQueen 917 and a barn-find 356
Beyond the themed displays, the Brumos Collection brought out the Gulf-liveried 917K in which Brian Redman set the fastest time at the 1970 Le Mans test. Formula 1 driver Jo Siffert then bought it and rented it to the production of Steve McQueen's Le Mans, released in 1971.
At the other end of the spectrum sat a 1957 356 A Outlaw with a long and strange history: its owner found a rusted 356 under rubble in the basement of a North Carolina general store, welded its roof onto a better shell, sold the unfinished project in 2004 because of ill health, and then saw it come up for sale 20 years later less than four kilometers from his home, his handwriting still on the parts boxes. It arrived at Luft 12 freshly restored, patina intact.
Tommy Kendall, the youngest IMSA champion in history, hosted the event, and Georgia-raised racer Leh Keen brought a group of rally-flavored 911s from his Keen Project.
Why it matters
Luftgekühlt has quietly become one of the biggest draws in Porsche's enthusiast calendar. Luft 11 in Durham, North Carolina, drew about 9,200 people and 400 cars last October, and the first Luft Tokyo in March put roughly 11,600 visitors on a closed expressway in central Tokyo, according to Porsche. Atlanta's 8,000 came despite the weather, which says something about how much air-cooled Porsche culture has grown since that first L.A. parking lot. Porsche hasn't said where Luft 13 will go.
