There’s a small bit of confusion in my mind about how Corvette ended up in MCACNs name even though I’m an insider involved in the show since early on.
There was a show that happened here at this time of the year for many years called ”Chevy Vettefest”. By the 2007/2008, the show had gotten pretty stale and was discontinued.
I’d heard they still had a year left on the convention center contract, so added all make muscle cars to the mix for the final year to see what happened, in 2009. That show got a lot of interest and the show was off and running.
But Bob Ashton corrected me on that story, so it’s not totally how things came to be. There’s no question there was some connection though, between Chevy Vettefest ending and MCACN starting, even if MCACN didn’t directly rise from the ashes of the Vette show like a Phoenix. At least one partner in MCACN was a principal in the old Chevy Vettefest, and some of my fellow workers at MCACN used to work at the Chevy show and then went on to work at MCACN.
After a couple years of the show, it was intended to drop “and Corvette“ from the name and just call it Muscle Car Nationals, but by then, the show had taken off, and the name MCACN was pretty well etched in stone, so it is what it is!
Whatever the case, the show features around 550 cars, and of those, maybe 75? are Corvettes. You look through my photo albums of the shows each year, and you’d think next to no Corvettes were there, I typically only take pictures of 2 or 3. They are almost all parked in one area so easy to ignore if you are like me and not interested in them.
Bob is a Mopar guy at heart, and the partners in the show have chewed him out for having too many Mopars in the mix!
