A million dollars buys you a lot of things. At The Bridge golf club on Long Island’s far eastern tip, it buys you a membership initiation fee and access to one of the most unusual car shows in the country, held on land that used to shake with Can-Am and Trans-Am thunder.
The Bridge, formerly the Bridgehampton race circuit, hosted its annual invite-only car show September 19 and 20 on the rolling greens that Robert Rubin converted from crumbling asphalt to manicured fairways decades ago. Rubin bought the track in the 1980s, tried for roughly ten years to keep it alive as a racing venue, and eventually gave in to economics and geography. You don’t run a racetrack next to oceanfront mansions in the Hamptons forever.
“I regret it now,” Rubin said during a lunch before the show. “Private racing clubs are popping up all over now, but I was just too early. Even my vintage-racing friends thought it was a bad idea back then.”
The original Bridgehampton circuit opened in 1957 after New York State shut down public road racing following a string of accidents. Dan Gurney, Mark Donohue, David Pearson, and Denny Hulme all turned laps there. Car and Driver’s own David E. Davis Jr. and Brock Yates used it as a test track. By the late 1970s, the serious racing was over, and by the time Rubin paved it into greens, the neighborhood had spoken.
Now the track’s ghost gets one day a year. Rubin and his partners, Jeffrey Einhorn and Shamin Abas, convince the golf club’s members to surrender the course for an afternoon and fill it with cars arranged not in the rigid concours tradition but in playful, curated clusters. A dozen Ferrari Testarossas in a rainbow of colors on one hill, a fleet of frog-green Porsches on another, an entire green where every car is white, differentiated only by wheel color.
There’s a life-size Mason Williams print of a Greyhound bus next to an actual Greyhound bus, surrounded by yellow supercars wearing taxi toppers. A drive-in movie plays a supercut of Hollywood car chases. Somewhere in the mix sat a 1960 Mismaque Squal, a Citroën 2CV-based sports car penned by a former Bugatti engineer named Guy Mismaque in the 1950s.
Einhorn handles most of the car sourcing, sometimes discovering collections through chance encounters at non-automotive events. He looks for the unusual, the unexpected, the stuff that makes people stop walking. The approach deliberately rejects the early-morning anxiety and judging tension that defines Pebble Beach or Amelia Island.
The Bridge starts in the afternoon. Late summer light turns the hills gold. Nobody is chasing a class trophy.
You cannot buy a ticket. You cannot enter a lottery. You must be invited, either as a car owner or as someone’s guest. That exclusivity strips away the crowd crush of public concours events and replaces it with something closer to a garden party. Whether that feels like a charming throwback or an exercise in gatekeeping depends entirely on which side of the velvet rope you stand.
Car and Driver’s Elana Scherr made the trip in a Mercedes-AMG GT63 Pro, navigating Manhattan’s obstacle course of pedestrians, delivery vans, and small dogs before reaching Long Island’s winding coastal roads. She logged four miles on foot at the show and spent half an hour frozen after meeting Martha Stewart, who admitted she prefers the four-legged kind of horsepower.
For those without an invitation, surrounding rallies and morning meets during the weekend offer a consolation prize. The Hamptons have never lacked for expensive metal on their roads. But only at The Bridge do you get to see it arranged like an art installation on a golf course built over a track where Donohue and Gurney once went flat out, in a place where the money eventually decided that silence was worth more than speed.
Rubin says he regrets the conversion. The membership fees suggest the market disagrees.
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