16th Cars that time forgot car show

I was in Madison, Wisconsin last weekend and had a few hours to spare.   I also had use of a rental car, which gave me the opportunity to travel further afield.    Back when I lived in America, there were interesting car shows all through summer I used to attend.   About an hour away was the Cars that time forgot car show, in Delavan WI.

This show was pretty typical of the ones I used to attend.  Owners from the area bring their interesting cars for a display day.   The scale of the population within driving distance meant that over 1,000 cars were in attendance.

Generally at these shows the most common type of car is American cars from the 50s to 80s, and in particular muscle cars like Pontiac GTOs, Camaros and so on.   Back when the Australian dollar was high in the mid 2000’s many American cars were imported to Australia.   In nearly all cases, these were the really well known cars like the Mustang, Corvette and Camaro.   Going to a show like this allowed me to see some of the more interesting models.

In particular, this show had a large continent of Corvairs and Pontiacs.   The Corvair is an extremely interesting car.    It was one of the most daring and interesting cars ever produced by General Motors.   Sadly, it is mostly remembered for being the first example in Ralph Nadar’s book ‘Unsafe at any speed’.   That book would go on to cover issues in the entire industry, but being first the Corvair was always the model associated.    I’m a big fan of the styling of the later coupe models and would be very happy to have one in my garage.

Pontiac is a now defunct brand of General Motors.   In its heydey it was GM’s performance brand and the GTO is the best known of these.   The GTO is known as ‘The Goat’ and was the brainchild of John Delorean.   One particularly memorable GTO model is ‘The Judge’.    The Judge is a good example of the sorts of performance packages that were offered at the time, and the irreverent advertising, featuring ads such as ‘The Judge can be bought”.

It was a nice day out to go and walk through the Cars that time forgot car show.   It was even better to drive there in my Dodge Challenger rental car.  I was even asked if I was an exhibitor as I drove into the show!   There are not too many rental cars that would get that question.