In Praise of the First Year Car Show

This might sound a little sacrilegious, but bear with me. Sometimes, long-running car shows are boring.

Yeah, I said it. I have a handful of car shows I’ve been attending for literal decades, and I can name what kind of car is going to be in which spot before I even get there. Big or small, when these shows are successful for ten or twenty years, they often rest back on their laurels and figure that everything else is going to work out. And sometimes it does.

But sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes I don’t want to see the same Chevelle or Chevrolet. Sometimes I want to feel like the show promoters are continuing to bring in new life and new excitement, despite years of success. I don’t want to feel like I can close my eyes and picture shows past, and they’re the exact same thing as the show I’m standing at.

And that’s why we need first year car shows.

I don’t mean it as a rah rah, go team, A for effort sort of thing. I mean, first year car shows still have something to prove and that often means they bring out all the stops. They have good vendors, if they can get them, and interesting and unique cars. Sometimes they pull in vintage race cars or get involved with a local car museum. Often there is live music or celebrities.

Long-running car shows, take note.

Because as I’ve written about in the past, the nature of the classic car show and the classic car hobby is changing. It is no longer based exclusively on nostalgia, and the eras from before WWII have found a niche, bringing war bikes and early 20th century brass era beasts from out of the woodwork. Younger people are attending these events, people who weren’t alive when the cars were produced, and technology plays an ever-present hand in this changing perspective.

And that’s good! This hobby is due for a shot of energy, and it gives hope for a continued existence to see that energy more and more. New car shows get that. They get the charm and aesthetic of eras other than the 1950s, they understand that some folks like race cars and other like bikes. They realize that evolution is necessary for survival.

And it is. Because if the traditionally successful car shows don’t evolve, at least a little, people stop attending. Weekly events, like cruises and cars and coffees, must prove themselves a more interesting place to be than the movies or the pool or at home watching literally anything on television. The world is changing, and simply opening the gates and letting cars stream through isn’t going to do it anymore. We need more, we expect more, and we want to feel like every time we go to the event, it’s evolving right there alongside us.

Because if it doesn’t, then those twenty or thirty years of successful car shows won’t matter. The first, second and third year shows have their finger on the pulse and they know what hobbyists want. These changes are good, they are necessary. And if these long-running shows don’t try their hand at reaching those new audiences and speaking those new languages, well, they can only blame themselves when they get left in the dust.