The oldest car on the field

KRIT of Detroit built a few hundred cars between 1909 and 1914, and then stopped existing. The marque is a footnote. But it produced exactly one Racer, and that car came to Lugano in 2026 as Car of Honour, supported by PKB Private Bank.

Its history is not tidy, which is much of its appeal. The original four-cylinder was replaced at some point with a ten-litre Curtiss OXX-6 aircraft V8 dating from 1916, rated at a hundred horsepower and capable of pushing the car past 160 km/h. It was brought from America to the United Kingdom in 2005 in poor condition and underwent an eighteen-year restoration. It is not a museum piece. It still races at British circuits, Goodwood among them.

It arrived in Lugano by transport from Scuderia Classiche and, across the concours, went out on parade three times.

That is the part worth sitting with. A car built in 1911 running the streets of a modern European city, sharing tarmac with traffic lights and delivery vans, on roads that in some form existed when it was new. It was built for surfaces like these, more than a century ago, and it is still capable of them.

PKB, a Lugano private bank founded in 1921, backed the car. There is a symmetry in that: an institution old enough to have been contemporary with the machine it chose to support, both still working.