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The Grand National Roadster Show Is Ready for Its 75th Year
This year, the Pomona Fairplex welcomes hundreds of restored and restomodded muscle cars, customized trucks and vans, and hot rods of all kinds to celebrate the milestone 75th Grand National Roadster Show. The GNRS will crown America’s Most Beautiful Roadster and bestow the Al Slonaker Memorial Award as usual, selecting each from a group of expertly crafted and perfectly polished contenders, but the Petersen Museum has collaborated to gather 50 previous America’s Most Beautiful Roadster and Al Slonaker Memorial Award winners to celebrate the show’s long history of celebrating coachbuilding craftmanship. It will be the largest collection of the show’s winners ever assembled in one place.
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This year, it’s a Blue Oval bonanza, as 11 Fords will battle for AMBR honors: a T-bucket, two Model As, five Deuces, and three ’36s. Conversely, the Al Slonaker Memorial Award contenders are a widely varied bunch, with a dozen entries including a DeTomaso Pantera, a pair of pickups, and a ’33 Pontiac built by Cal Automotive Creations, the shop that took home the Slonaker Award in 2023 with this beautiful 1960 Buick Invicta.
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The Grand National Roadster show runs Friday, January 31 through Sunday, February 2 from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm at the Pomona Fairplex. For more info on what to expect, visit the show’s website. Tickets are available online.
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I have never been to this event but have had close contact with the winner from several years. I was working in the gas station in Akron Ohio and we had a rig from California Street Rods come in. It was a box truck and trailer with a 57 Chevy on the open trailer.
They came to fill the Chevy up with fuel. I asked if that was the car from Hot Rod Magazines cover I just got. It was. Then he said here look at this. he opened the truck and let me sit the MBR winner from that year. It was art work.
They again won and brought the winner in when they came to town to visit sponsor BFG just down the street in the spring. Again they had it in the truck and was getting fuel.
We were close to BFG and the companies that worked with them. One day in a rough neighbor hood I went out back and in the Alley was the BFG 962 and the winning 924 from Le Mans. Also another time was John Buffam’s Audi world rally car. Often cars from the pages of the magazines would show up so it was fun to see these things where you never expected to see them.
Today there are so many high dollar hot rods it is not like it used to be. Now many locals have cars as well done as many cars from the past or better. It just does not feel like the shows are like they used to be.