The first edition of ULTRACE in Germany took over five halls, eighteen thousand square metres and more than three hundred cars. Areal Böhler, the post-industrial grounds of a former steelworks in Düsseldorf, was given a new life under the title Archived Dreams. Within a few steps of each other stood historic race cars once known mainly from Le Mans records and behind museum ropes, factory prototypes, collector-grade rarities, contemporary hypercars and projects from the independent tuning scene. The foundation on which Ultrace was built in Poland remained untouched. Cars, scene, people, selection. The difference was that in Düsseldorf, sound, light and scenography were treated as equal parts of the exhibition for the first time.
Areal Böhler has occupied the left bank of the Rhine for almost one hundred and ten years, just minutes from the centre of Düsseldorf. It was originally built as a steelworks producing specialist steel for German industry. Over the decades it evolved from heavy industry into a living hub for business, trade fairs and cultural events, but it had never hosted a format quite like the one proposed by ULTRACE Germany. Raw brick, concrete floors, steel structures carried by monumental columns, openings in the roof. During golden hour, light poured through them into the halls, falling across bodywork and bouncing off metal, paint and polished wheels. Each of the five halls had its own character, its own proportions and its own way of receiving light. In that kind of setting, the exhibition could afford sharp contrasts without losing coherence. The Mercedes-Sauber C11 and the BMW X5 LM V12 represented extreme approaches to motorsport engineering, where technology pushes far beyond common sense. The Porsche 917 and the BMW 328 Kamm Coupe stood on the other end of that axis, as classic silhouettes and endurance racing legends. Each of them came from a different era, a different team of engineers, a different technology. The exhibition did not flatten those contrasts. It used them, while the space itself added a depth that no gathering of rare cars can create on its own.
Most of these cars normally exist out of reach. They stand behind museum ropes in Stuttgart or Munich. They wait inside private collections where access comes through a friend, not a website. Some survive as one-off prototypes that were never meant to reach production. In Düsseldorf they shared a roof for two days, only a few steps away from cars from the tuning scene that are rarely seen in that kind of company. What connected them was more fundamental than era, brand or horsepower. Every one of them exists because someone could not, or simply would not, let go.
The BMW hall was dedicated to forty years of the M3. BMW M from Munich marked the anniversary with its own collection. A chillout zone, walls covered floor to ceiling in M Series posters, places to sit down and take a breath. The selection stretched from the E30 M3 to projects that never made it into production. The M3 Compact, a mid-1990s concept, and the E46 M3 Touring, the only prototype of that body style ever to leave the factory gates in Munich. At the centre of the hall stood a BMW M2, worked on throughout the weekend by Rae Roberts. Layer by layer, she painted directly onto the bodywork. The composition grew in front of the audience, hour by hour, until it reached its final form.
The Mercedes hall was minimal in its arrangement and full of energy. A separate softbox hung above each of the four cars, while light and sound together turned the space into a performance. The whole interior worked like an installation. All four exhibits came from the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and captured the brand’s strongest decade in motorsport. The Sauber C9, the Le Mans prototype that won the race for Mercedes in 1989, stood next to the C112, a 1991 road concept planned for a run of one hundred cars that never made it beyond prototype stage, and the C292, a 1991 Group C prototype. The composition was completed by the CLK GTR, the FIA GT1 homologation car that took the title immediately after its debut in 1997.
Koenigsegg brought two contemporary hypercars, the Regera and the Jesko. The kind of machines that raise the temperature of an entire hall on their own. Rennmeister’s hall pulled visitors into the world of classic motorsport: a BMW E21 Group 5, a Porsche 962, and period details surrounding them. The fact that all of these worlds could meet under one roof said a great deal about the level of trust placed in this new format. These were not standard partner booths. Brands and collectors brought out objects from private collections and museums that are rarely seen side by side.
The strongest moment of the two days unfolded in the Active Zone. Every few hours, as part of the Never program, technicians fired up a sequence of extraordinary machines inside a dedicated area. Mercedes-Sauber C11, Porsche 917, Porsche 908, Mazda RX-7 Le Mans, BMW X5 LM V12, BMW 328 Kamm Coupe, BMW M5 CSL Prototype, Ferrari 348 Koenig Specials, AMG GT3 RAW SPEC and Gumpert Apollo. Each with a different context, each with its own place in motoring history. Here, though, they were not only on display. They were alive. Engine note and echo ricocheting off the steel structures of Areal Böhler. The biggest impression came from the BMW X5 LM V12. It remains one of the strangest prototypes in the history of BMW M. Beneath the bonnet of the first X5, BMW installed a V12 closely related to the engine used in the victorious BMW V12 LMR at Le Mans in 1999 and in the McLaren F1. Nearly seven hundred horsepower in a family SUV, sounding like a nineties racing prototype. At first ignition it filled the hall with a sound that pulled people in from every other part of the venue. That was the part of the programme no museum can truly recreate.
Deep inside the main hall hung a black curtain. Behind it began the 143BPM installation, built by Filip Popik, known as Rybskie, around the HWA EVO, a contemporary reinterpretation of the legendary Mercedes 190E EVO II. The space was acoustically dampened, an enormous softbox changed colour and sculpted the shape of the car, and the speakers carried music at one hundred and forty-three beats per minute, which gave the installation its name. Inside, half-darkness and a controlled atmosphere took over. You could be alone with the car, as if the rest of the event had suddenly fallen away. It resonated differently there, closer to an installation than a conventional display. Many people stayed inside far longer than they had planned.
Right next to the main stage stood Horsepower. An installation created by French artist Bleumode, Julien Boudet, in collaboration with Rennmeister and Ultrace. The starting point was a classic BMW E30 in Jägermeister colours. Its four wheels had been replaced by four racing motorcycles, merged into a single machine. The build itself was executed by the team from nightride.pl. In the eighties and nineties, Jägermeister orange became one of the defining images of DTM. Bleumode took that emblem from the world of motor racing and set it within an entirely new composition. There was humour in it, irony too, but also a very precise eye for image-making. It was difficult to walk past without stopping.
At nine in the evening, the main hall changed its face. Night Access began, an exclusive three-hour chapter of the event. Natural light gave way to a carefully directed spectacle, while suspended lighting installations started to take control of the space. Colours shifted fluidly. At times everything turned red, at others it disappeared into darkness, while point lighting singled out individual cars. Behind the booth stood Sept, moving between hypnotic techno and ambient textures. He later described the set as a dialogue between machines and sound. The same cars that stood in calm exhibition mode during the day became part of a club environment after dark.
At the end of the two days, the Top 10 of the exhibition was announced on the main stage. The international jury, made up of Khyzyl Saleem, better known as The Kyza, Mike Burroughs of StanceWorks, photographer Larry Chen and Ash Thorp, selected the ten strongest projects from everything shown across Areal Böhler. These are names that have shaped directions in design, photography and car culture for years. Among the projects under consideration were also cars from the private collections of The Loh Collection, Chrome Cars and RS Racetec. The event was also visited by Sung Kang, best known for playing Han in the Fast & Furious series, who appeared while promoting his film Drifter.
By the end, it was clear that ULTRACE Germany had found its place outside Poland. Everything Ultrace had grown from in Poland remained intact. Around that foundation, two new dimensions had appeared. The first was the trust of partners who, for the first time, handed over their archives for two days to a hall where independent projects from the tuning scene stood alongside them. The second was a new exhibition format, in which scenography, lighting, music and the work of artists became just as important as the cars themselves. The first international edition of Ultrace came to a close. The second can already be seen from the perspective of the first.
