A day in New Mexico - Park n' the Park car show
Being a local tourist - visiting a car show in New Mexico
Today I was left mostly unsupervised and what better thing to do than go to a car show?
I love doing local stuff and, even more, I love car shows. In fact, before the StressLess Camping RV podcast came to be I published the Curbside Classic Car Show with my buddy Jim Cherry. That podcast was part of a whole collection of things sprouting from the Curbside Car Show Calendar, an on-line car show calendar I owned.
As part of Curbside I also published a weekly car review and DJed at a lot of car shows. I really love vintage cars.
My kind of car
The car show I went to was called the Park n’ the Park car show in Rio Rancho, New Mexico and, apparently, this is a long-standing tradition. It was advertised as having over 300 cars which was promising.
I’ve been to a few car shows since coming to New Mexico and they have been okay. I mean, they’re still car shows, right? But nothing that special.
But this was pretty good. My favorite kind of vintage cars are the ones that are as close to original condition as possible. I respect the kind of work that goes into customizing cars and I also love rat rods, but the original stuff is what really speaks to me.
There were also quite a lot of original condition cars - often called survivors. It’s a little weird to me that cars from the 1990s can be in a car show but, heck, that was 30 years ago. Yikes. But there was plenty of other eye candy.
A few of the more interesting rides included two Saab Sonnets, A Geo Metro convertible, a Nash Metropolitan, lots of vintage Mopar (Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge) and some other rides.
There was a DJ there, Steve’s Cruising’ with the Old’ies (sic) with a vintage trailer doing a great job of spinning tunes and making announcements.
The Chevrolet Corvair
When I met Peggy she had already been immersed in the world of the Corvair and, as a certified auto nut, I gladly joined her. Since we’ve been together, now over 20 years, we’ve had four Corvairs and used to sponsor a Corvair that was run on time trials in Southern California.
Something I really liked about this car show was the diversity of the cars - everything from beautifully restored machines to survivors to rat rods, lowriders and more.
And finally I came upon the lone Corvair at the show, a 1964 series 700 sedan. This was an unusual example because it had the optional fender skirts which wasn’t a popular option. It was also an automatic. And it’s for sale.
Now since we’ve moved to New Mexico we have kept one garage on the property sort of empty a little bit and referred to it as the Corvair Garage. Stay tuned, ya’ never know.
Our previous Corvairs included a 1964 camper, a 1961 Lakewood Wagon, a 1962 Wagon and a 1960 sedan.
While many people credit Ralph Nader as having killed the Corvair, he actually extended the life of the brand. While the original intent of the Corvair was as an economy car, it turned out that it more appealed to enthusiasts, especially after the Corsa model with its high-performance engine arrived on the scene.
What really killed the Corvair was the Mustang. It appealed to the same people and they bought Mustangs in droves. So, Chevrolet focused on creating a new competitor for the Mustang, the Camaro, and let the Corvair languish.
But Nader’s book was an affront to GM who, at the time, was a cornerstone of the American economy and the company continued the Corvair until 1969 just to prove that an upstart lawyer couldn’t beat the world’s largest corporation. The Corvair had originally been planned to be discontinued in the 1967 model year after the Camaro arrived.
Buick Grand National
In the 1990s Buick found itself with the reputation as a car for stodgy old guys. It was a car for stodgy old guys. So they went about fixing that by putting a turbocharger on their 3.8 liter V6 engine and got a bit of attention.
Here was an otherwise-boring mid-sized coupe that had a bit of punch to it at a time when pushing your car uphill was the fastest way to get some fun out of it. With the attention Buick got, they kept refining the idea until, ultimately they built a really fast GNX version that was one of the faster cars available at the time.
This is relevant in two ways. We came to this country from Germany and my dad had a job offer at a company called Garrett which became AiResearch. His job was to work on a smaller turbocharger, the T3.
Ultimately that’s the turbocharger that made the Buick such a hot commodity and it was nice to see one of these cars at the show. While your average vehicle today has more power than even the mighty GNX, this was a car that brought back fun cars to a lot of people.
In fact, when these were new, I worked at the Automobile Club of Southern California in downtown Los Angeles. One of my co-workers wanted one of these cars but many dealers were marking them up beyond MSRP which was unusual at the time.
But he finally came in to work one day proclaiming that he had gotten one so we all went down to the parking lot to look at it. And it was pink. Well, I’m sure GM had a fancy name for the color but we all said it was pink.
That didn’t stop us from taking the car up to the drag strip in Palmdale to see what we could do with it but it also was a great source to tease Mike about his pink Buick.
Enough about me - more about me
I’ve produced my share of car shows in the past, ran car clubs, and just been fully immersed in vintage cars. I love the whole vintage car scene and have far too much brain space wasted on knowing automotive trivia.
It was nice to be out at a car show again - it’s been since last year when I stumbled upon a car show in Indiana. That thing was enormous and I remember some of the car shows when I lived in L.A. that had many hundreds of cars of all sorts.
L.A. is such a huge vintage car market for so many reasons and it’s not unusual to see everything from some clunker barely running and a million dollar Duesenberg.
When I was a young lad growing up on the beaches of L.A. I remember you could trade a surf board, a six pack of beer and a pizza for a rattly old VW van. Nowadays those things are like gold with many of them selling at auctions for well over $100K. It’s nuts.
There was a really beautiful example of one here but I hate seeing these lowered, although everybody tends to lower them. But it’s for sale.
These things were awful as drivers. The brakes were like making a request at a radio station - you might put in your request (step on the brake pedal) but don’t expect much in the way of a reaction from the binders at the wheels.
Same with those sewing machines they called engines. But they were cool. But the Corvair van was still cooler. To me.
Are you into vintage cars? Something else I love to talk about.
Where are car shows going?
I had mentioned having had an on-line car show calendar and website and I have since pulled the plug on all of those things. Honestly, car shows are fewer in number for a variety of reasons including the fact that younger people are less interested in vintage cars and car shows.
Also, traditional car shows, where you sit around in the sun all day, are also in decline. More and more people would rather go to what is called cars and coffee gatherings where you can come and go as you please and don’t pay an entry fee.
The idea of a car show is strange in some ways - you restore a car and then pay someone to sit around all day hoping for a trophy. You have to arrive very early and spend the day sitting in the sun. Cars & coffee events make more sense in every way although they do make it tougher to raise money for charity events which is often why car shows are held.
Car clubs, too, are dwindling because it used to be the place to swap information and find parts and now we have the Internet and social media that are much better for that. Time marches on.
