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When the 2007 Los Angeles Auto Show opens its turnstiles
this coming November, it will signal the end of a long and
hard-fought contest. Actually, it means there will be two LA
shows this year. Until now, the event had been staged each
January, overlapping Detroit's North American International
Auto Show. The shift signals the grudging acknowledgement
that Motown's mid-Winter car fest has firmly established
itself as the king of U.S. car shows.
During any year, there are literally hundreds of car shows
across the country. Some are small enough to stage in the
atrium of a shopping mall, drawing a few hundred to several
thousand potential shoppers. Chicago's show, each February,
covers several million square feet at the vast McCormick
Center, and typically attracts more than a million paying
What are all those Big-Top Tents doing in Scottsdale,
Arizona? Has the circus come to town? Ah! It's mid-January
2006 and the annual beginning of the automotive season
with a spectacle of non-stop "auction action," where ego and
power seem to prevail over wise investment "sanity" during
the weeks-long collector-car auctions.
Speed Channel ran 33 hours of live TV coverage of
Barrett-Jackson this year. Those "three minutes of fame"
attracted buyers and helped push the numbers to astounding
heights. If you only had one word in your vocabulary, you
would have been considered completely fluent as "sold,
sold, sold!" was the single word reverberating in the massive
tents that were sprawled all over the Scottsdale area
with the five auction venues drawing hundreds of thousands
of "car people" to the desert. Peer pressure, ego, and a theatre-
like atmosphere play their part in the exuberant glitz visitors. Though Detroit's Cobo Hall can't come close to
matching McCormick's scale, the Motor City event has
earned a place as the most important car show in the country,
indeed, one of the World's top five.
It wasn't all that long ago that the Detroit show was barely
an afterthought; little more than a dealer-run event
designed to boost demand during the cold Winter months.
Seventeen years ago, the show shifted focus. Renaming
itself an international auto show was more than just clever
marketing. Sponsors pitched foreign makers, as well as the
domestics, and the debut of the North American and frenetic bidding with prices going to surreal levels in
the blink of an eye!
Barrett-Jackson's 35th Car Collector Auction extravaganza
covered the Westworld's polo field with 6.5 acres of
tents, one of which, said to be the largest in North America,
stretched 1,500 feet from end to end and was draped with
a 121,000 square foot American flag. Spectacular, to say
the very least.
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