ooooIYKYK, ISSUE #oo52, SUBSCRIBE TO THIS NEWSLETTER ON SUBSTACK.
Pottstown, PA — On the last weekend of summer, had you stood at the corner of High and Hanover streets in downtown Pottstown, Pennsylvania, you’d have found yourself in front of a blue inflatable Liqui Moly arch. Underneath was a spectrum of Audi unobtainium: a red RS 4 (B5) Avant, a brown 100 LS (C1) bagged on Porsche Fuchs alloys and, beyond that, an RS2 Avant with a roof box. Pivot in any direction and, through crowds estimated at 25,000–35,000 people, you’d have seen even more cars. Vendors lined Hanover Street. Show cars stretched for blocks along High Street and spilled into parks, the town’s train station and adjoining parking lots. This is L’oe Show.
Founder Jamie Orr modeled the event after the iconic GTI Treffen in Austria, known simply as “Wörthersee” to most for the lake along which it took place. At one time, Wörthersee attracted tens of thousands of people and encompassed weeks of official and unofficial activity. In its heyday, the official program included a sprawling presence by Volkswagen, Audi, SEAT and Skoda. The brands built concept cars expressly to debut there. In 2014, I ran across a group of familiar faces in the Audi space that included Ferdinand Piëch, his wife and handlers, along with Volkswagen Group’s CEO, Audi AG’s CEO, head of product development, head of marketing, chief of design, head of quattro GmbH and more. Wörthersee connected the highest levels of the company with their most passionate owners.
That culture it inspired reached around the globe. The fans it built remained long after Piëch’s death in 2019, which was also the last year the official GTI Treffen took place. Enthusiasts still gather around the lake, and Volkswagen even staged a successor event in Wolfsburg, but neither has been nearly as impactful as those years.
Jamie Orr remembers them. He was there too, and L’oe Show is his tribute. First held inside a Pottstown mall in 2021, the event shifted to downtown the following year and hasn’t looked back. Weather permitting, the city center is the better location. Here, L’oe occupies a literal crossroads while the Volkswagen Group enthusiast community finds itself at a figurative one. In a way, so do I.
That familiar Wörthersee feeling yet closer to my home is one thing I love about L’oe. Another is its strong sense of community, rooted in a shared appreciation for automotive brands steeped in their own culture. The crowds are massive, just as they were beside the lake in Austria, but they aren’t all hardcore enthusiasts. Those people are here, of course; some have planned their visit for months, perhaps ever since last year. Others are casual car fans, wandering in last minute and curious what the culture is all about. Still others are locals who heard something big was happening and came to investigate. L’oe is free to attend, so anyone can wander in and find out.
For me, the town comes with another layer of familiarity. Jamie chose Pottstown in part because it is his hometown. His shop, Orchid Euro, sits on a side street below The Hill School, where I attended for a few years at the end of the ’80s. Whenever I visit Jamie’s shop, I find myself looking up at the school.
Hill was founded in 1851 and sits, quite literally, on the hill above town. It has the boarding school history and prominent alumni to go with the setting. Oliver Stone visited to talk about The Doors while I was a student there. A former secretary of state and alum was a visitor to the history teacher and houseparent on the hall where I was a prefect, while an NBA legend’s son and namesake was a new boy on the next hall over that same year. Back then, Hill was all boys. It admitted girls for the first time in 1998, after I had left.
Downtown Pottstown offered a different view of the world from the one I got on campus, which was part of its value to me. The town isn’t traditionally considered part of Philadelphia’s prestigious Main Line like the communities of Ardmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr; Pottstown sits farther out. It doesn’t present the same polished image, and I don’t mean that as a slight. High Street has long had its own social life, including cruising and car shows. Pottstown Nights, held by the Red Horse Motoring Club, is another reason residents are accustomed to seeing people take over downtown to enjoy cars. L’oe brings a different mix of people and machinery, but locals know the drill and welcome the gathering.
I tend to find myself thinking about Hill a lot during L’oe weekends. The school’s decision to become coed opened it to students it had previously excluded, a sound choice even apart from the need to compete with rival schools in more posh, ivy-lined towns. Hill and a car company face different challenges, of course. Still, as a Hill alumnus, an automotive journalist and someone who has lived and worked inside this enthusiast community, I kept returning to the question of who gets invited in and who notices when they’re left outside the gates.
THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW
Saturday night offered a compact demonstration of how deep into the details things can get at L’oe. Though originally more known for his YouTube presence, Jamie is also now a publisher having recently invested in and thus saved the UK-based car culture print magazine Performance VW, a.k.a. PVW. The magazine marked its 30th anniversary this year with a V.I.P. party in an old dealership building on High Street that also serves as “the Museum” during show week. Part of the celebration was a trivia contest hosted by fellow car journalist and YouTuber Jason Cammisa.
Alex Martini, another prominent YouTube personality, was a contestant on the opposing team. I had met him the night before, and his video account of discovering L’oe’s culture as a relative outsider is a perfect reminder how people come to both find and get drawn into this community. The show rewards deep knowledge, but it also gives curious people a relatively easy entry. Stay humble: there’s always someone who may know more than you do, and you stand to learn more than you imagined about your car and the culture around it should you choose to participate.
That night I found myself participating, competing alongside PVW writer Connor McCann and Autrey McVicker, the founder of GMP Tuning and another public figure in the Volkswagen scene. Jamie had debated whether to ask me to contribute questions or enter the competition. My history with VWvortex probably helped settle that, though my years covering Audi meant I’d be a ringer when questions turned toward the four rings.
If we were first on the bell and first to answer, we received points. If nobody knew, the questions went to the crowd because, in the end, the draw was the shared experience and not the conscripted know-it-alls on stage.
Our team did well, largely because our knowledge didn’t overlap. Connor knew European Volkswagen lore and PVW culture. The slightly older Autrey knew the American scene and VW facts from his own timeframe. I knew Audi and, as the oldest and a kid of the ‘80s and ’90s who parked his first Scirocco in the student lot at The Hill then helped launch VWvortex a few years later, had absorbed enough older Volkswagen history to answer questions from before my teammates were driving.
Name the Herbie movies? No problem.
It was a game of course, but the room made a serious point. These were “heavy hitters” by the measures that count in this world: years spent learning about, building, documenting and sharing the cars. The IYKYK factor is strong in rooms like this, a common thread in the community that also helped inspire the name of this site.
You see it again on High Street. A car many might walk past on any other day draws an audience on this day because someone spots the details. Someone nearby fills in the history. The owner joins the conversation and shares the backstory in detail. There is no velvet rope holding anyone back. A newb or normy who wanders in knowing almost nothing can walk away understanding what makes the car special while having made a couple of new acquaintances along the way.
FROM THE MALL TO HIGH STREET
In the weeks before this year’s show, I was in a group chat with Jamie and event co-producer Sean Maynard, Volkswagen of America’s former enthusiast events manager. Sean now runs his own agency supporting gatherings including L’oe and Luftgekühlt, bringing order to the madness. We were talking, in part, about whether Audi might participate, even in a casual way.
I remember a time when that question was easier to answer. L’oe began in 2021 at the former Coventry Mall. Volkswagen participated, likely because Sean helped make it happen from his role at the Volkswagen brand. Audi participated too, with advocacy and help from Audi Club, where I worked at the time. We took over an empty Foot Locker and gave it an enthusiast-focused Audi identity, with an Audi Sport collection boutique managed by a local dealer and cars that made the trip worthwhile for brand enthusiasts venturing into a large public gathering during a pandemic.
We’d already arranged an RS 6 and a Sport quattro on loan from Audi, but Jamie argued that we needed more. We lobbied Audi of America hard for its Le Mans-winning R8 LMP1. Key people at Audi saw the value, the car arrived and took center stage in our rebranded Foot Locker. Jamie got it on the local news. Good times.
The show now resides on Pottstown’s main street and beyond. Its schedule this year filled four days with smaller meets, drives, parties and the Sunday main event. The Saturday Audi gathering at Sly Fox Brewery, supported by GarageTaught and Audi Club, drew more than ever. Hundreds of cars lined up for blocks to get onto the grass and stay for the afternoon. Their owners returned Sunday to do it all over again, parking downtown for most of the day.
Audi’s section of the main event has grown beyond the city block it usually occupies. Cars spilled into nearby areas, around the Pottstown train station, past the square and into the main exhibition area. Audi Club Eastern Pennsylvania was active throughout the weekend, helping with the Saturday meet and maintaining a visible presence at the main event. A gathering at a member’s home, supported by Audi Wilmington, gave owners a more intimate place to spend time together. On Instagram, the show continued through posts and reels depicting still more gatherings organized by people with substantial followings of their own.
All of that happened without an official Audi presence. Volkswagen was absent too, as it had been the year before.
I had asked around at Audi about whether something could happen for L’oe, but it just didn’t for multiple reasons. I understand why Labor Day weekend is difficult. It’s the last holiday of the summer, and asking someone to work an event like this requires more commitment than a line in an events budget. Sending an agency to do the work in the traditional way big brands operate would likely cost a fortune. I’m not interested in passing blame and understand how hard it is to do car things on a family weekend. I am concerned, however, about what the lack of attendance, even a casual appearance, communicates about the priorities behind those decisions.
Last year, Volkswagen’s first year missing the show demonstrated that L’oe could carry on without any brand presence of any kind. This year made the point again, on even more streets and with even more people. The owners, clubs, supportive local businesses, influencers and media were there. The brands whose cars brought them together were not.
WHAT THE BRANDS DID DO, AND WHAT THEY MISSED
A few weeks prior, Audi had taken the Nuvolari to The Quail and Pebble Beach during Monterey Car Week. I’ve been to Monterey and its easy to see the appeal of those events to a premium manufacturer. A new flagship can be seen by an exceptionally wealthy audience, with photos posted by the usual suspects in the media and influencer establishment who receive invitations and comped hotel rooms every year. At the same time, Audi’s absence from the club-run Legends of the Autobahn gathering during Car Week, followed by its absence from L’oe, was harder for me to swallow.
Pottstown asks something different of a brand. There are not arranged surroundings, Michelin-ranked bistros, boutique hotels or manicured fairways filled with an idealized customer demographic. Instead, there are real-world owners, many of whom may know more about the products than the people who work at the brand. Passersby may look more longingly at an enthusiast-modified and out-of-production model than they do at the latest top-of-the-line offering brought by the brand.
That can be intimidating. It can make for an uncomfortable interaction, but it can also be the most useful one a car company has all year. Some owners would be far happier debating with a product manager or brand historian than chatting with a polished agency representative staffing a display or dining on a Michelin-rated curated meal.
That’s key because these customers cannot be measured solely by their spending power. Their value isn’t easy to quantify. For many here, the cars are an affliction; a collection might also be a hoarding habit. I can understand why someone whose enthusiasm comes principally from a day job and time spent behind the wheel of a company car might find these conversations tiring. Guests may be more knowledgeable, sometimes insufferably so. Some will be disappointed with the brand. Many will be eager to explain exactly what would bring them back into a showroom, and it may not be anything currently for sale. These aren’t always easy conversations… especially nowadays.
L’oe isn’t Pebble Beach or The Quail. The crowd is younger, less uniformly wealthy and more likely to judge a car by unconventional measures or by modifications made beyond its original intent. An RS2 or B5 RS 4 is a superstar here, but so is a thoughtfully built A3 whose owner stretched a budget to get it right. The next person to wander through that same crowd might be a longtime collector, a local family, a Main Line executive or a curious student from the boarding school on the hill. That is the nature of L’oe and the street-level car-focused community that attends it.
That broad spectrum of engaged people is one reason I wince when manufacturers take enthusiast or their events like L’oe for granted and maybe don’t even bother showing up. Many cars on display are old because they’ve become a shared family hobby, if not a family member outright. Some are old because their owners seek a visceral experience they feel they can no longer find in a new model. Neither means those owners have stopped buying new cars. Most of us still need something to drive every day. Many would like the brand that fuels their passion to make a new car they care about just as much.
Conversations with those people can be challenging for brand represntatives, especially when those customers feel left outside the gates, looking in and unheard. Chasing numbers such as media impressions from A-list influencers or desirable demographic data in a patently lavish and gated space is a whole lot easier. But is it effective?
Volkswagen Group faces serious business pressures unrelated to L’oe. Manufacturing costs, European EV mandates, declining sales in China, American tariffs and the long aftermath of dieselgate payouts have all contributed to the predicament the company is now trying to manage. Pottstown is a long way from the factories under threat of closure in Germany, but on weekends like L’oe Show, the distance between the brands and some of their most committed customers seems like a far greater distance. Closing that matters at a time when the brands need all the help they can get.
That’s why the Hill analogy stayed with me as I wandered among the hundreds of cars and thousands of people at L’oe Show.
When Hill admitted women, it made a difficult choice to change one of its most established practices. In making that move that seemed so radical to its established comfort zone yet so obvious to those outside its gates, the school expanded the pool in a very natural way, making it even more flush with those invested in its future. Volkswagen Group already has an extraordinary pool of candidates who themselves already have an affinity for its brands. They’ve bought the cars, learned their most obscure histories, founded clubs, opened shops, made friends and even formed families around them. Cutting back on the cars that speak to those people, then withdrawing from the gatherings they build, doesn’t foster and grow that pool.
For Audi and Volkswagen though, they need to want to go. Ferdinand Piëch didn’t just send an agency. He went personally. He took his wife. His leadership at the very highest levels knew this. They went there and saw it for themselves. It was their shared culture too.
That community and that culture are still there. If these brands care to meet them and put in the time, they can be found at High and Hanover: the experts, the obsessives and the people who have just discovered the community. They care about where it goes next. Whether they find their way to a local dealership and help keep it all rolling past tariffs, EV mandates and other business challenges is up to the brands themselves.
Next year at L’oe, I hope the companies come too. There is a great deal waiting for them on High Street where the cars park and the community gathers.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Want to learn more about events like the 2026 L’oe Show or Ferdinand Piëch and his senior staff visiting Wörthersee? You’ll find summaries and full galleries added to this website’s Audi Archives project via the links below.
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