Worth the Drive or Not
Every car enthusiast has a list of meets they swear they'll get to someday. The good ones give you the kind of day you talk about for years, like the morning a stranger popped his hood and walked you through the turbo swap he did in his own garage. The bad ones mostly involve a two-hour wait for parking and a view of someone's phone held over the crowd. Crowd size and police attention usually decide which kind you get. Here's 10 car meets every enthusiast should visit, followed by 10 that don't live up to their reputation.
1. Goodwood Festival of Speed
Lord March, now the Duke of Richmond, started the Festival of Speed on his family's estate in West Sussex in 1993. Race cars old and new now run a 1.16-mile hill climb right past the front of Goodwood House, close enough to the hay bales that you can feel the exhaust. The paddocks are open, so you can wander up to cars you've only seen in photos.
commons.wikimedia.org on Google
2. Goodwood Revival
Show up to the Revival in jeans and you'll feel underdressed within minutes. Racing at the Goodwood circuit ran from 1948 to 1966, and the Revival has recreated that era every September since 1998, spectators included. Vintage aircraft fly over the track between races, and even the mechanics wear period overalls.
Ady (flickr user) on Wikimedia
3. Woodward Dream Cruise
Every August, Woodward Avenue north of Detroit turns into a slow-moving parade of muscle cars. The Dream Cruise started in 1995 as a fundraiser, and organizers now estimate that about a million people come out along its 16-mile route. Folding chairs claim spots on the grass by breakfast, and some of them were set out the night before.
Stephen K. Donnelly at en.wikipedia on Wikimedia
4. Hot Rod Power Tour
The Power Tour is a road trip with a few thousand strangers. Hot Rod magazine launched it in 1995, and each summer it rolls through a different string of cities with a car show at every stop. Participants drive their own cars the whole way, which weeds out the trailer queens fast.
5. Radwood
If your dream car has pop-up headlights, this is your event. Radwood began in Northern California in 2017 and sticks to cars from the 1980s and 1990s, with plenty of attendees dressed in windbreakers and acid-wash denim to match. A clean Volvo 240 wagon in the right shade of maroon can draw as big a crowd there as a Countach.
6. Japanese Classic Car Show
Old Datsuns and Toyotas have filled a stretch of the Long Beach waterfront every fall since the show started in 2005, many of them still wearing their original paint. Owners obsess over factory-correct details, down to dealer stickers and original floor mats.
Motohide Miwa from USA on Wikimedia
7. Bonneville Speed Week
Top speeds at Bonneville are measured in hundreds of miles per hour, on a dry lakebed in western Utah. The Southern California Timing Association has run Speed Week there since 1949, and spectators can walk the pits and talk to the builders. Weather still decides everything, and the event was canceled in 2014 and 2015 because the salt was in too poor shape to race on.
8. Nürburgring Tourist Drives
For roughly the price of a nice dinner, you can drive your own car around the Nordschleife in Germany. The old circuit runs about 13 miles through the Eifel forest. The parking lot at the entrance works as an all-day car meet whether you take a lap or not.
Herranderssvensson on Wikimedia
9. Gridlife Midwest
Gridlife Midwest mixes time attack racing with a music festival at GingerMan Raceway in South Haven, Michigan. You can camp trackside and watch drift runs all afternoon before the DJs take over at night. Built Hondas and track-prepped Porsches share the same paddock, and it stays open for anyone who wants to wander through.
10. Your Local Cars and Coffee
The best meet on this list might be the one ten minutes from your house. A small Cars and Coffee on a Saturday morning costs nothing, and the guy with the rusty Miata will talk your ear off about it for an hour. He's also the person who'll help you swap a clutch someday.
Now, here's 10 that get more hype than they've earned.
1. Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance
General admission to the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance runs several hundred dollars. The cars are extraordinary, and the day mostly involves shuffling across the 18th fairway behind thousands of people holding champagne. The free Concours on the Avenue in Carmel-by-the-Sea, held the same week, gives you more room to breathe.
2. SEMA Show
Most people posting photos from the SEMA Show in Las Vegas work in the industry, because the show is closed to the general public. Attendees have to prove they're in the aftermarket business, usually with company credentials, before they get a badge.
3. Daikoku Parking Area
YouTube videos of JDM cars lined up at night made this rest stop near Yokohama famous. They also drew so many tourists that police now regularly block the entrance on weekend evenings, sending everyone back onto the expressway. A lot of visitors make the trip from Tokyo and see nothing but a closed ramp.
4. H2Oi
In September 2020, two people died in Wildwood, New Jersey, during an unofficial weekend tied to H2Oi. The event started as a Volkswagen and Audi show in Ocean City, Maryland, and grew into a street scene that local police spent years trying to shut down. Maryland even let Ocean City set up a special event zone, with lower speed limits and bigger fines, for the weekend the crowds usually showed up.
5. Street Takeovers
California passed AB 3 in 2021, letting courts suspend the licenses of drivers convicted of speed exhibitions. Takeovers look wild in a 30-second Instagram clip. In person, you're standing in a smoky intersection with no clear way out when the sirens start.
6. Tail of the Dragon
Three hundred eighteen curves in 11 miles sounds like a driver's dream. On weekends, this stretch of US 129 on the Tennessee and North Carolina border gets crowded, and photographers along the shoulder sell pictures of every car that passes. The speed limit is 30 mph, and deputies enforce it.
7. Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale
The January auction in Scottsdale plays out like a TV production, because it is one. Much of the floor space goes to vendor booths, and the headline cars can be hard to get near once the bidding crowd gathers. The auctioneer's chant runs for hours, and after a while every lot starts to blur together.
8. Detroit Auto Show
The North American International Auto Show used to be where carmakers unveiled their biggest models every January. It moved to September in 2022, and several major brands now skip it or bring a scaled-down display. A busy dealership sometimes has more new metal on the lot.
Joe Ross from Lansing, Michigan on Wikimedia
9. Mega Cars and Coffee
Once a Cars and Coffee grows past a few hundred cars, the exit becomes the main event. Crowds line the driveway with phones out, waiting for someone to launch it onto the main road. One bad pull in front of all those cameras is how these meets tend to get shut down for good.
10. Gumball 3000 Stops
Gumball 3000 has been running since 1999, and a stop in your city sounds exciting on paper. Expect a crowd twenty deep around wrapped supercars that leave within an hour for the next city. Entrants pay a steep fee to join the rally, and most of the cars wear matching sponsor wraps.
