Sarah Payne grew up in Auburn, so the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival loomed large in her young life.

Four years ago, after a stint managing Riverfest at IPFW, Payne was put in charge of the ACD Fest as its executive director.

“It was kind of like a coming home,” she said.

The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival launched in 1956, which makes it thirteen years older than the biggest festival in Auburn’s municipal neighbor to the north, the Three Rivers Festival.

This year’s 60^th Anniversary ACD Fest starts with a wine tasting on August 27 and concludes with a cocktail reception on September 4.

Managing events like these is tricky. You have to please the people for whom the festival is a beloved, venerable tradition and you have to make new fans as well.

“It definitely is a balancing act,” Payne said. “When I started with the festival a couple of years ago, we even ended up reevaluating our mission statement.”

Payne said the festival shifted its focus from pleasing current automotive enthusiasts to fostering future ones.

“We literally have strong festival supporters who pass away ever year,” she said. “So how do you get newer generations involved in something that is for many financially out of reach?”

One way is to add flashy new events like the Fast & Fabulous show, which debuted last year.

Any resemblance to real movie franchises, filming or wrapped, is purely delightful.

Fast & Fabulous features exotic and luxury cars that can’t be seen anywhere else.

“Last year, our goal was the have 25 cars come,” she said, “and we ended up with 50. It was awesome. It was just spectacular. They were just amazing cars. And partnering those with having these old cars downtown was just amazing. After the festival, I heard so many compliments. That night really was the first time in a long time that this younger crowd – teenagers, twentysomethings – were really interested in checking out the cars. I feel like we really hit the nail on the head with that event.”

Payne said she thinks they may see as many as 100 cars at the Fast & Fabulous event this year.

One of the goals with the festival going forward, she said, is to get a message out to people who are not necessarily obsessive about classic cars that the festival has a lot to offer them.

“Cars are the stars of the show, obviously,” Payne said. “But we want to make sure that people recognize that, even if you aren’t necessarily a car enthusiast, there’s a lot to do.

“I remember this old commercial for Indiana Beach: ‘There’s more than corn in Indiana,” she said. “Well we’re kind of branding ourselves as: ‘There’s more than cars in Auburn.’”

This year’s festival will feature auctions, a flea market, a parade, a swap meet, a wine tasting, a gala ball, a pancake breakfast, a formal dinner, a speakeasy, a pageant, numerous concerts and food trucks, an ice cream social and many other happenings.

The ACD Festival is one of those unique events that is composed of official and peripheral fun. The automotive enthusiasts who show up participate in official events and throw their own shindigs as well.

Payne said festival attendance is 100,000 and calls that a conservative estimate. She said as many as 700 or 800 vintage and collectible cars will be on display during the Friday Downtown Cruise-In on September 2.

Roughly 5000 cars will be featured at the festival in various contexts, she said.

Attendees and participants come from across the globe, Payne said.

When one considers that 100,000 people annually descend on a city with a permanent population of about 12,000, it does not seem as if there’d be much room for growth.

But Payne said she thinks there is space to expand a bit.

“We want to do it in such a way that we make sure we can accommodate,” she said. “We laugh: Our hotels in Auburn tend to fill up a year in advance. But what we’re finding is that there are hotels on the north side of Fort Wayne, Kendallville and Angola that can really benefit from the festival. So I don’t think we’re at capacity.”

Attendance can grow, she said, but what organizers are really hoping to do is to increase the festival’s demographic reach.

“I’m not an automotive enthusiast myself,” she said, “but I am an Auburn enthusiast. And so if I can instill what this festival means to our community in others here; hopefully, we have a fighting chance to get our kids and, hopefully, their kids to care and keep it alive.”