HRE Open House 2013 Coverage

I recently moved to San Diego and was fortunate to attend the HRE Open House in Carlsbad as my first SoCal car show as a native – and it was a blast! Everything from Porsches to Bugattis to Audis were in attendance, and I did my best to take photos of the highlights here…

The place was jammed full of modified Euros and Exotics, including some super rare cars like the Bugatti Pur Sang, a Ferrari F40, and a RWB Porsche. Lots of local shops, companies, and car clubs piled in, from eGarage to AccuAir to TAG Motorsports to Gas Monkey Garage, bringing the event to an epic level.

There were a lot of really incredible cars, but seeing the F40 above was pretty special. It was purchased wrecked by Gas Monkey Garage for $400k after a pretty bad wreck, then restored to the condition above. While some purists may turn their nose up and modifying the iconic F40, I think they did a pretty good job at keeping the modifications pretty subtle and classy.

Talking about cars that make purists squirm, the RWB Porsche above certainly fits that description. It recently underwent a color change from teal/turquoise to chrome wrap, which made this already attention grabbing car stand out even more. It certainly isn’t my taste, but it’s a car that’s interesting to check out for sure.

But those Porsche purists who get worked up over the RWB cars still had plenty to appreciate, such as this gorgeous and ultra rare (and very stock!) Porsche Carerra GT above…

There were so many incredible cars at the event, it was easy for otherwise nice cars to get lost in the mix. I have no idea what the official count was, but I would guess they had close to 1,000 cars there. The HRE facilities are downright humongous, and it was cool to tour around and see all of their in-house production facilities. While some forged wheel manufacturers work with unnamed white-label shops overseas to make their wheels, HRE is made in California, USA baby.

Another highlight of the show (for me anyway) was meeting some of the members of the newly formed San Diego Audi Club. The group secured a spot together, which was really cool to have. I’m looking forward to hanging out with these guys and gals some more…

Speaking of Audis, there was a ton of really great four ringed cars at the show. I counted at least half a dozen R8s, several RS5s, a few really clean S4s, and even a really killer B7 RS4.

The guys at TAG Motorsports rolled deep to the show bringing a lot of really clean Audis. I really liked this B8.5 S4 on air ride and gold HREs:

They also had this gorgeous RS5, man do I want one of these:

There were tons of great cars there, Audi and otherwise, at the show, so let’s keep it going…

AccuAir had a really cool display, featuring their widebody A4 above that debuted at SEMA as well as a really slick Allroad below:

Rounding out the wagon trifecta was this really sweet CTS-V wagon (on air, of course):

I don’t normally cover a lot of Mercedes in this blog, but there was no shortage of nice Benzes to appreciate, including a really nice Black Series…

That’s all I have here, thanks for tuning in! If you liked this post, please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter or wherever you like to share these kinds of things 🙂

Full Photo album (152 photos) on Flickr here: