CHUBB drove the tour

An insurance company that specialises in classic cars can spend a weekend standing next to them. At Lugano Elegance 2026, CHUBB drove one.

The car was a Fiat 1100 TV Spider, and it went out on the Friday tour with everything else. It is not a car that wins a concours on presence. It is small, it is Italian, it was built in the second half of the 1950s for people who wanted an open car rather than a fast one, and its natural condition is moving. Choosing it says something. A partner who arrives in a modern SUV with a stand and a banner is at the event. A partner who takes a sixty year old car out on the same roads, in the same weather, with the same risk of not making it back, is in it.

CHUBB was a main partner of the 2026 edition and was present across all three days, which is less common than it sounds. Most partnerships at events of this kind are concentrated into one evening.

It started on the Thursday. As the cars arrived and the owners went through onboarding, CHUBB had a welcome stand at the point of registration. That is the first hour of the event, when nobody has judged anything yet and everyone is still finding out who else came. It is also the hour when a specialist insurer is genuinely useful, because the questions people have about a car they have just driven across a border are practical ones.

Friday brought the tour, with the 1100 TV in the field. Then, in the Lugano Elegance Village on Piazza Riforma, CHUBB held its Signature Event, an aperitif for around forty of its Ticino based brokers. They came into the square where the concours would be judged the following morning, among cars they spend their working lives describing on paper and rarely see in the open. The 2026 field was around forty cars. It made for a neat piece of arithmetic on the square that evening: one broker for each car, more or less, most of them meeting the subject for the first time.

On the Saturday, CHUBB stayed in the village through the concours, across the five squares the event occupies: Piazza Riforma, Piazza Manzoni, Corte del Palazzo Civico, Piazza Maraini and Piazza San Carlo.

There is a reason an insurer belongs at a concours rather than merely paying for one. The cars in that field are not ordinary cars, and they are not an ordinary problem. They are driven rarely and far and the cost of putting one right after a small mistake bears no relation to the cost of the mistake. The people who work on that problem are almost never visible at the events where the cars appear. For three days in May, in Lugano, they were.