Ultrace by the Sea
Something happened we didn't expect. Ultrace moved from Wrocław to Gdańsk, or from Breslau to Danzig if you're German. Anyway, we don't know how long this change will last, but I love it.
It was my fifth Ultrace. It started for me as a dream trip, became a ritual, and is now part of my life. This edition was special because it was the first time my son worked on the Ultrace production team, led by Łukasz Dawczyk, COO of Ultrace and co-founder of Driven Stories. For Łukasz and Adrian Kapica, the CEO of Ultrace, it was their 16th edition.
The biggest difference this year is a shift from a car show, an exhibition full of automotive art, to a pure car festival. It's the Coachella of cars and racing. You get the best of the best celebrating creativity in the custom car industry and heritage, alongside a huge playground for content creators. One of the great surprises was a free Sony equipment rental in the media room, complete with technical and product support. It was a game changer for all of us on the media and editorial side.
In my view, Ultrace is built above all for the media creators, who compete with each other while supporting everyone else. There is a new breed of Ultracers: young, creative, polite, and laser-focused. As Driven Stories, we want to feature those creative souls who use their own sensitivity to tell human-plus-car stories to people around the world.
Ultrace mixes every layer of the car scene at once. Old racing, modern drifting, custom, stance, classics, rallies, Le Mans, you name it. It's all there in proportions you can't fully digest in real time. Drift sits at the heart of the mix, giving the festival its own pulse. The full assault of cars, personalities, and flavors of the industry is hard to put into words. You have to experience it yourself.
Sung Kang, best known as Han from Fast and Furious, was there promoting his new film Drifter. He was signing literally thousands of movie posters and taking selfies with everyone.
If you're into rallies, you would also have spotted a modest guy from Finland sliding cars on the Ultrace Parking Area, the drifting event that's part of the festival. That was Kalle Rovanperä, two-time World Rally Champion and the youngest in WRC history, now chasing an F1 dream and drifting anything he can get his hands on in between. Seeing a global champion mixed in with the fans without any tight security showed exactly what this festival is about.
Kalle wasn't the only flag flying from somewhere far. Sultan Al Qassimi came in from Sharjah with two cars that told two very different stories. One was his carbon-fiber-bodied, LS-powered Bentley Continental GT, built from the ground up as a drift car. The other was his 911 Liwa, a safari-prepped 911 named after the desert region it was born to handle. The man runs an in-house workshop in the UAE that turns out builds people don't tend to attempt twice. Two cars from two completely different planets, sitting in a Polish car park near the Baltic. The kind of contrast only Ultrace lets happen this naturally.
From California, Chris Ashton, the man behind Ruffian Cars, landed with two of his signature builds. The Ruffian 500, a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 restomod that draws its DNA from the Holman-Moody factory lightweights that won the British Saloon Car Championship in '63. And the Ruffian 40, his modernized take on the original Ford GT40, where everything that felt or performed as vintage gets replaced and only the silhouette stays. Two American shapes, redrawn for now.
And then there was Mike Burroughs. If you've ever scrolled through automotive culture on the internet in the last decade, you already know him by his hands more than his name. Founder of Stanceworks, the man who built Rusty Slammington, the famously incinerated, scorched-patina BMW E28 with a 3.7-liter VAC Motorsports S38 inline-six built to scream past 9,000 rpm and a Group 5 widebody. The car survived two garages and one fire and somehow keeps going. Mike is the Tony Hawk of the modified car world, a name that defined an era and refuses to settle into it. Watching him walk the festival with Rusty in tow was one of those moments where you realized half the kids in the venue had probably built their visual taste around what this guy did.
And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, a Lotec C1000 and a Lotec Sirius. Both one-offs, both from the same tiny German workshop. The C1000 came first, a 1995 commission for an Emirati oil tycoon. Twin-turbo Mercedes-Benz M117 V8, 1,000 PS, barely over a tonne, $3.4 million at the time. The Sirius arrived six years later with a twin-turbo Mercedes-Benz V12 from the same family that powers the Pagani Zonda, dialed up to a claimed 1,334 hp on 1,280 kilos. Each was the only one of its kind ever built. Both sitting next to each other in Gdańsk. I don't know how to phrase that without sounding ridiculous, so I won't try.
This is a festival with winners, but no losers. How? Because being one of the 709 selected cars out of thousands of applications is an award in itself. Does that sound like the dreaded participation medal, the running joke about Gen Z? It isn't. The Ultrace team selects cars very carefully, with some unofficial wild cards thrown in.
We got one of those wild cards, bringing in the very first RWB built in Poland. There are twelve of them completed so far, with the next three currently in build. But this isn't my personal memoir of Ultrace, though I'll write that anyway whether you want it or not. I want to remember my own road to Ultrace 2026, which took five years.
"carbonfayba" Godzilla
Anyway, back to winners and losers. The biggest winner is the Nissan Skyline R32 GT-R created by Garage Active from Japan, owned by Kazushige Sakamoto, the "carbonfayba, carbonfayba, carbonfayba" guy. This winner is obvious. The car is sharp, stylish, never cosplayed, a perfect tribute to the Japanese Godzilla translated through modern engineering. You may call Ultrace a Nissan festival sometimes, and that's a fair point.
Photos: Aleksander Krajka
