For my first car show of the season, I wanted to check out the UConn car show at Rentschler Field in East Hartford, CT. For the past 2 years, I’ve been hearing it’s an awesome show with a good blend of cars, trucks, and even motorcycles. With that on my mind, I was even more excited to find out there were going to be close to 3,000 show cars coming and somewhere near 15,000 people in attendance!
Sunday morning was greeted with an early rise around 5:00am to meet up with a few others from FCP Euro at the office. We grabbed a few essentials for our booth we’d prepped the night before, gassed up of our cars, and started our hour and twenty minute long drive to Rentschler Field. It was a cold morning, too, and had left the house with short sleeves and a t-shirt – not the best choice. The drive up was pretty awesome with scenic views and plenty of curvy roads. It was a smooth ride, right up until I was told I was driving painfully slow… guess I was still half asleep but the coffee kicked in soon enough!
Once we arrived at Rentschler Field, we weaved our way through what seemed like a never-ending cone maze to finally arrive at the FCP Euro booth, with the C300 to greet us on full display. We set up shop and got ready to check out all the show cars entering in. I have to say the parade was impressive in its diversity of both foreign and domestic cars. All different styles of cars, trucks, motorcycles, and one-off cars made an appearance. Everything from your slightly modded cars to the fully built monsters, luxury VIP cars to high-end exotic; JDM, Domestic, and Euro worlds collided and it was awesome. There was something for everyone. For me, it was the old school European VW's and JDM cars imported from Japan that caught my eye. With the DJ pumping music out all day, and rows and rows and rows of cars, it took me two solid attempts to finally get a chance to look at a majority of the vehicles at the show. The vendors on hand definitely came out with some stunning displays, too. In the end, I was able to find two cars that really captured my attention. One was a VW Corrado, it was clean, not heavily modified, but enough to take notice with some rare all original Recaro seats. The second was a Suzuki Sidekick that was fully built with a 13B rotary motor and a turbo almost the exact same size as the motor bolted to it. It had enormous Nitto NT555R slicks in the back and skinnies up front like an outlaw dragster. Oh, and it sounded amazing!
At the end of the day, once the last trophies were handed out, people filed out to show off how loud their cars were and who two steps better. I made my way to back to the FCP Euro booth to help clean up and tear down our stand to head home. It was only then that I realized how sunburnt I was from being out in the sun all day. Well worth it considering how awesome an experience the day turned out to be, and combined with it being the first upper 70-degree day of spring, this car show couldn’t have been better. I'll just have to make sure to bring sunblock for the next one.
