Engines roared and coffee steamed Sept. 27 as Cal Poly Racing Team rolled into the Porsche dealership in San Luis Obispo for the Cars & Coffee showcase. The event, which is held on the last Saturday of each month, gave the student-run racing team a chance to show their creations beyond campus.
While Cars & Coffee has been around for many years, the event started being held at the Porsche dealership in San Luis Obispo thanks to Tony Brizzolara. This last Saturday was Cal Poly’s first time at the event.
Cars & Coffee hosted monthly events from the San Luis Obispo Porsche dealership for the past year and a half, Brizzolara said. The event functions both as a meet-up for Porsche enthusiasts and a marketing opportunity for Porsche to show off some of the cars for sale at the dealership.
For club president Ria Mehta, the day was about more than just showing off cars.
“What drew me in was seeing how much college students dedicate their free time to building something together,” Mehta said. “It’s not just about the cars, it’s about the community.”
Brizzolara, a 1976 Cal Poly alumni and former business administration major, works at Porsche as a “Porsche Pro.” Brizzolara’s main duty at Porsche is to demonstrate to buyers all the features their new car has to offer.
After coming to work at Porsche in October 2023, Brizzolara pitched the idea of starting a Cars & Coffee meetup at the dealership. Two years later, Cars & Coffee is booming with an average Saturday bringing out an upwards of 100 people who gather to look at, and talk about, cars.
Brizzolara was contacted by the Cal Poly racing team about displaying some of their cars at the event. Brizzolara and his team staged the cars front and center, staggered between members’ Porsches and other enthusiast classics.
The community came together as the team showcased their student-built Formula and Baja vehicles alongside Porsches, muscle cars, and vintage classics. The event highlighted Cal Poly Racing’s hands-on engineering approach: students design in the fall, build in the winter and test in the spring before competing, according to Mehta.
“It’s never just one person doing the work,” Mehta explained. “With such a large team, the biggest challenge is communication, but also the biggest strength is support.”
Cal Poly Racing Team competes on a global stage, facing teams from Canada, Singapore and South Korea. But Mehta emphasized that events like Cars & Coffee help broaden the team’s reach locally.
“We usually connect with middle schools or diversity-focused clubs on campus,” she said. “Cars & Coffee tapped into a different audience, and it let us share what we do with people who might not otherwise see it.”
Brizzolara also works as the liaison between the Porsche dealership and the Porsche Club of America, which has a local chapter here in San Luis Obispo with about 520 active members. He says that most of the attendees of Cars & Coffee are Porsche club members, but everyone is welcome.
“It was really cool,” Brizzolara said. “They are really smart kids and they are very enthusiastic about what they’re doing and they’re very innovative.”
Usually, around 90% of the cars at Cars & Coffee are Porsches, according to Brizzolara. And while Cal Poly Racing Team’s cars were not Porsches, the community at Cars & Coffee was enthusiastic as they congregated around the cars to ask questions and check out their build.
“The attendees really had a great appreciation for the engineering design and the efforts that these kids are doing,” Brizzolara said. “We were really happy for them to be there and receive that recognition.”
Brizzolara said his favorite thing about Cars & Coffee is the camaraderie of it all and the relationship between the attendees. Whether they are looking at cars or enjoying a cup of coffee and a donut, Saturdays at the dealership are an opportunity to unwind and talk about cars, and Cal Poly Racing Team’s attendance was a natural fit.
“We enjoyed it a lot,” Brizzolara said. “It dovetailed into cars, and it dovetailed into Porsche because racing is our underlying breed.”