Air | Water
Orange County Fairgrounds

Air | Water 2024 landed on Saturday, April 27, at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa. Gates opened at 9 a.m. and the fairgrounds filled quickly—indoor halls and outdoor plazas stitched together into one Porsche skyline. I moved between owner-driven entries and more curated “hero” placements, the mix spanning seven decades in a single walk. Under clear coastal light, you could read the contrasts: patina beside paint-to-sample, narrow bodies against modern wide hips, club plates near track rubber. It felt like a full-spectrum roll call—air-cooled lineage meeting its water-cooled descendants on neutral ground.

I worked the fairgrounds in loops—indoor halls first, then the plazas where the light runs clean across hoods and rear decks. The mix rewarded slow walking: early air-cooled cars with honest patina parked a row from paint-to-sample 991/992 GTs; narrow bodies giving way to modern wide hips; period ducktails sharing space with swan-neck wings and track rubber. In a single sightline, you could read seven decades of problem-solving—cooling, aero, grip—expressed a dozen different ways. That’s the Air | Water trick: owner cars and spotlight features coexisting without hierarchy, each shot less about rarity than about story, stance, and how the details come alive in coastal light.

Air | Water grew out of the Luftgekühlt playbook. In 2023, the team extended the Mare Island weekend with a Sunday program that welcomed water-cooled Porsches alongside the air-cooled faithful—proof that the format could bridge generations. In 2024, it became a stand-alone show at the Orange County Fairgrounds, and by 2025, the concept returned there with the same blend of owner cars and spotlighted features. It’s the same curatorial DNA—Patrick Long and the Luft crew—applied at a larger scale: open, inclusive, and story-driven, with placement and lighting used to bring visitors closer to the machines.