RUNS VS SHOWS
By noderel:
A car show by any name is still, too often, a snore. The rules for a show are simple:You spend all the money and do all the work, and the car has all the fun. This as opposed to the rod run where the car does the work and you have all the run!
So, exactly when did a rod run become a car show? At exactly the same moment when the run presenter decided to charge a spectator admission. On the calendar, for street rodding, that would be approximately 1969. For me, that would have been the very first Rod & Custom Street Rod Nationals. Yep, I’m fessing up, because I was one of the organizers.
And we had to charge a spectator admission to help pay the expenses. However, and that is a huge “H”, this very first rod nats was supported almost exclusively by the participants plus a handful of sponsors. Compare this costing to an indoor show where the professional promoter is taking the entire event risk, and is entirely responsible for the venue, the advertising, the awards, the paid personnel…you get the point.
In the beginning of street rod runs, the idea was to locate and publicize a venue, get the word to like-minded rodders, and then wait to see what turned up. The professional promoter can’t flip that kind of coin. And there is nothing wrong with a good promoter presenting a hot rod show. I use Gary Meadors as an example. Here is a person (family, really) that has really lived up to the term Goodguys. This is an organization that is unabashedly professional, but when you do a good dudes event, you feel like you have just been to a family picnic. Truly, an outdoor car show with some quirky benefits. But they are laid back affairs where Gary and the crew greet everybody the same. That doesn’t hold true in many shows, whether on the grass on in the dome.
Back in the olden days of hot rodding, the show was an EVENT. Because there were precious few of them. And contrary to popular msconceptions, we had rod runs back then, only we didn’t call them as such. But runs were slightly more common than shows, even if a run might be nothing more than a dozen buddies driving somewhere for the day. You get half a dozen hot rods travelling to El Mirage as spectators, you got a rod run, by any standard. And if those same cars stop off in the canyon for an extended gas fill and burger call, you get a show. In a way, that is what we started with on those earliest of recognized runs with the LA Roadsters, etc.
Whatever, a car show is not about driving a hot rod or custom car. It is about parking your car wherever someone tells you to. It is about shining the car to please someone else’s fancy. It is about “Lookit mine, it is better than your’s.” In short, a car show is about self-proclaimed elite-ism, and in the end it proves absolutely nothing. A car show is entirely subjective. Unless, of course, you set out to jump into the competition of car showing and go head’s up to win everything there is to win. In this situation, the car show becomes a no holds barred ripper. Which is what Ermie did.
You remember Ermie? Ermie Immerso, who successfully ran plenty of hot rods in the more traditional forms of automotive competitions. Anyway, he decided a few years back to take on the car show crowd, beaming directly at the old Oakland Roadster Show ne-National Roadster Show. He built a track styled T roadster directly to the car show judging sheets then extant. And he knocked the wheels off other contenders, each season changing the same basic car enough to satisfy the rule books and to keep the spectators interested. Even so, Ermie’s roadster was old hat after that initial Roadster Show debut. One of the problems of car shows (as with magazine coverage) is the notoriously short attention span of the so-called Enthusiast.
But Immerso proved a point: If you are going to be a car show rod or custom builder, then do it Big Time. That means checking out the game rules, then building to those rules. Which is exactly what changed the early days of drag racing to separate the men from the boys. You wanna play in the Bigs, you better do the homework, and you better hone your skills, because you go in the Big League you gonna face a whole different class of players.
Of itself, the car show is not anathema to hot rodding. It is just that the emphasis on glitter has insinuated itself into the hobby/sport so much that even rod enthusiasts have distorted the reason for owning and driving a hot rod or custom car. In this respect, I always remind myself “sticks and stones..”.
In the end of it all, doesn’t matter what I think, only what you, the average hot rodder, think. And do.