This year's Jalopnik Film Festival kick-off party will again feature a mixture of the coolest car people we could assemble in one room (and still have room for cars), including race car drivers, directors, television personalities and at least one Raphael Orlove. We'll also debut Ignition, the short film produced with Volvo Cars based on a script by a Jalopnik reader.
I'm not even sure where to start, as this year we're going to be joined by so many great people, but I'll just start with the race car drivers because they're race car drivers and one day I hope they'll loan me one of their cars. Up first is CFH Racing's Verizon IndyCar Series Driver Josef Newgarden, one of the most exciting faces in the series and the best performing driver from a single-car team in 2014. And yes, he promised to bring an IndyCar with him.
From the sports car world comes Andy Pilgrim of Cadillac Racing, who, along with Johnny O'Connell, scored the manufacturer's championship in this year's Pirelli World Challenge. Pilgrim has also raced in NASCAR's Sprint Cup and at Le Mans and, we should mention, started out racing a Renault Alliance in the '80s. Much as we begged he will not be bringing the Renault Alliance.
Do you love television? I love television. And we'll have Spike Feresten, host of The Car Matchmaker, and Bloomberg's Matt Miller on hand to give you their very strong opinions on the new 911 and try to convince you to ride motorcycles.
Filmmakers? Yeah, we've got a few. Jeff Zwart of, well, being being famous for being Jeff Zwart will be there, along with Ahsfin Behnia of Petrolicious, J.F. Musial of /DRIVE and Tangent Vector, and other filmmakers featured at this year's festival.
And those are just the people who I can remember right now. It's going to be great so, if you didn't get a VIP ticket early, I'm sorry you're missing out.
Photo Credit: AP, Cadillac Racing, Matt Miller