With the calendar somehow now reading “September”, there’s one thing in the back of all of our minds: the toys will be heading into storage before long. With perhaps a month remaining before batteries are pulled and covers are put on, it now feels like a mad dash to hold and partake in as many shows and meets as possible to make use of the time we have left in this car season.
This leads us into not only today’s photos, but an explanation as to why the blog was idle over the weekend. While there’s no extremely precise posting schedule maintained for officialTHREETWENTY, generally speaking a new entry will be up at some point each weekend and perhaps an extra one will occasionally be thrown in mid-week. This weekend however, myself and many of our friends found ourselves at 2 (or even 3) large events that took place. The two in particular that I participated in were Steel Dreamz on Saturday, and the Custom Decals x So Scare Closer on Sunday.
Naturally there will of course be posts incoming that will properly cover each event and the vehicles present in more detail; today’s entry is more of a summary of events from the two days, to update the site and provide a peek into what happened while I work to get through the rest of the photos (since I’m not the madman that Jason is. Seriously dude, you have two kids. HOW DO YOU DO IT? Haha).
I will say that normally I wouldn’t enter two big events back-to-back like this, but in each case I (or we) had been specially invited and couldn’t really say no; for Saturday’s Steel Dreamz Steve had asked if we could bring a couple of the cars to be on display to represent Speedy Collision, alongside some pretty high-profile builds that they’d also had a hand in over the years.
Given they’d repainted both vehicles the S15 and Suburban were called upon to show, and Doug’s E30 was as well given it too had been through their shop! I was quite excited to have the S15 in the lineup alongside the likes of Terence’s EK and Binh’s Z, meanwhile the Suburban and E30 could finally make their show debuts after their restorations.
Unfortunately rain was a bit of a theme this weekend with each show starting off a bit wet, but both days the skies did end up clearing and we all had a great time regardless – especially Steve, who kept returning to the awards table to collect trophies on behalf of the owners whose cars were in his care for Steel Dreamz. At the end of it 4 of the awards (including Best in Show) went to vehicles in the Speedy group!
If I had to nitpick, the only noticeable issue with the show was a distinct lack of doggos wandering around. At all of the events I always try to grab photos to send to a dog-loving friend of mine and after the entire day at Steel Dreamz, I only had a couple to show for it.
Of course, by having to “complain” about something like that, what I’m really saying here is that the show was amazingly fun (despite the weather’s best attempts to work against us) and after only ever experiencing the prior editions through photos online it was amazing to not only finally be there myself to take it in but also have a car on display. However, after it wrapped we were only at the halfway point of the weekend’s happenings because we were set to do it all over again on Sunday….
After a night’s rest then, the next morning many of us met up again at Universal for the Closer which brought out an even bigger group of cars as well as a few faces we hadn’t seen in months, or in one case years. Just as set-up was ending the skies decided to open and many of us – myself included – were literally holding down the tents for the booths so as to keep them from cartwheeling into cars, but fortunately before too long things settled back down and we could go dry everything off and start enjoying the show.
And while the original plan was for the S15 to attend the Closer as well, I decided that perhaps it was time for Mustard to make an appearance despite it being retired from formal shows these days; this was totally not helped by a few friends bugging me (repeatedly) that they wanted to see it out at show again. Sure enough, as soon as Yolanda saw the ST bumper and Cup Spoilers peeking around a corner, she came running over!
I was of course going to attend – especially after witnessing the insane event that was last year’s – but I need to extend a special thanks again to Shawn and the rest of the team as they had invited me to be one of the judges this year which was a real honour! Just like last year they had a good selection of some very nice trophies made up and so as soon as we could let go of the tents and come out from hiding, I was also off to start the hunt for my pick.
At the end of the day then, after other prizes had been handed out, it was time to announce the winners of the various categories – some of which I’d found out about when all of us judges submitted our picks, while others were unknown to me too until the names were called. Both Liam and Roxy took home trophies for the Civic and Genesis respectively, so a massive congratulations to them!
The biggest surprise and honour of the weekend for me though was when Shawn announced that I had been selected to receive their “Best OG” award! I suppose it’s a sign I’m getting older (as if the seemingly ever-younger looking crowds at these events wasn’t already, haha) but I really was caught off-guard and quite humbled to be given this at the end of the day. It made me even happier to have Mustard at the show then, as it felt quite fitting to have the OG officialTHREETWENTY car present when I was handed this.
So yes, that’s what we got up to this weekend, and why I wasn’t in front of the screen editing and writing as I otherwise would have been. As mentioned though, the posts that will properly cover the events and (importantly) your vehicles and what you got up to, are to come as soon as I get through the photos! Excitingly, Mario’s new vehicle should also be landing this week though so watch for that soon as well. I have a lot of editing ahead of me!
-Bill