Cowboys at the Velodrome

The organisers didn't leave the place alone. The stage migrated to a new spot, which sounds like a small thing until you notice how it changes the way the crowd flows around the infield. The food zone grew from an afterthought into a proper district of the event, and right next to it the chill zone gave people a place to sit down, catch their breath, and watch the infield from a distance before diving back in.

The cars were up too, in number and in level. More than two hundred and fifty of them made it through the selection, and the selection clearly got harder. Walking the banking, there was noticeably less filler between the highlights, and a good share of the plates were not Polish at all. Cars had come in from the UK, Czechia, Austria, and Germany. Last year's mix of Japanese icons and German classics returned in a stronger form. Substance has always been described as an event for insiders. The insiders, apparently, now come from all over Europe.

It helps to remember where this started. Substance began as a gathering of friends, the kind of meet where everyone knew everyone and the cars were almost incidental to the conversation. Five editions later, the friends have multiplied into a crowd, and the crowd crosses borders to get here. Michał and Daniel, the duo readers may remember from our Unimog story, have spent years shaping this thing, and the growth shows in the details: the selection, the styling, the sense that nothing on the infield is there by accident.

Every edition of Substance carries a theme, and the theme is never explained, which is precisely the point. Last year it was white balaclavas and a night styled after the eighties. This year, cowboy hats appeared over band tees and workwear, and the track briefly became the least likely ranch in central Poland. Somebody had brought a Porsche Diesel tractor, red as a barn door, and parked it in the shadow of the timing tower, which settled the question of how seriously the theme was meant to be taken. On paper, a Japanese coupé on Watanabes and a Stetson belong to two different worlds. At Substance they ended up in the same photograph, and by mid-afternoon the western styling no longer felt like a costume. It felt like the mood of the whole event.

Our contribution to the scene rolled in on wide arches. We came to Łódź with Kabuto, the red RWB 993 built by Akira Nakai in Łomianki, one of the first cars he ever finished in Poland. Readers of our Łomianki – Tokyo story know the lineage. Parked against the concrete, the wide body caught the late-August light and looked completely at home. A hand-built Japanese take on a German sports car slotted into the western weekend as naturally as anything else on the infield, one more culture joining the mix that Substance does so well.

The most telling sign of where Substance is heading had nothing to do with horsepower. Kamil Koźlarek (@kozlarek_) put together a print zone among the stands, where he and the crew from N2.studio sold their own work, with wykadrowany (@wkdr_) helping them keep the stand running. People walked out carrying actual physical photographs under their arms, the way they might leave a gallery, which by that point was more or less what it was.

The afternoon settled into the rhythm Substance does best. People drifted between the banking and the infield, stopped at cars, stayed for conversations. The person next to you turned out to be someone you'd known for years through a screen. The food zone hummed, the DJ played, someone in a cowboy hat leaned against a Skyline as if this were the most natural pairing in the world.

The infield offered its usual quiet absurdities. You could get a haircut at the barber stand, walk out of a mobile studio with a fresh tattoo, or sit in on a conversation with people from the motorsport world, all within a hundred metres of a banking lined with cars. Nobody seemed to have decided in advance which of these was the main attraction.