A chat with Car Craft and Hot Rod Publisher Jerry Pitt at this year’s Summer Nationals.
The Car Craft Summer Nationals returned to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds July 17-19, this time with a political agenda.
Car Craft magazine’s annual street machine event, sponsored by GM Performance Division, has drawn thousands of muscle cars, late models and other vehicles to the fairgrounds each year for the past decade. With a dyno challenge, autocross course, launch box competition and burnout contest, the Summer Nationals has become more than a show.
The event continues to grow each year, but with the Big Three’s troubles, the push for ever “greener” auto technology and the launching of government programs that threaten many of the vehicles Car Craft is all about, the mood was more defensive this year than ever before. I heard the concerns from show-goers – and loud and clear from Car Craft and Hot Rod Publisher Jerry Pitt.
“We’ve got this opportunity to take a message to this group here,” Pitt said. “Don’t leave without knowing our community is in jeopardy. There are people out there who don’t want you to drive your car anymore. There are people that think that they have a better answer. They don’t have a better answer.”
Pitt said Car Craft is “deeply vigilant” about protecting car hobbyists’ rights to own and drive their vehicles and lately, that effort has become a top priority.
He said many of the people out there waving a green flag don’t realize that much of what they’re fighting against is actually what they want.
“Turning in an old car doesn’t help the economy or the environment,” Pitt said. “They need to recognize that most of these cars are our hobby cars. We don’t use them all the time.
“A ‘69 Chevelle that’s been restored twice has a much smaller carbon footprint than a brand new Prius, because a Prius has parts that come from all over the world, it’s got to be plugged into the wall [to draw power from a plant somewhere], and where do those batteries go when they go south?”
Pitt, who organizes the Hot Rod Power Tour as well as the Summer Nationals, is pushing hard to grow both events in the face of the hobby’s challenges. The Summer Nationals will continue to be in St. Paul, a site suggested back when Chuck Schifsky (son of drag-race legend Bill Schifsky) was editor of Car Craft.
“He always touted how big the car culture was in Minnesota,” Pitt said. “He got into a position of influence on Car Craft and said what we really need to do is have a summer nationals event at the fairgrounds or do something in Minnesota.”
So the event was born. Schifsky is no longer with the magazine (which is based on the west coast), but Car Craft keeps coming back here.
“Why do we come here? Well, you know, nobody’s from L.A. We all grew up somewhere else,” Pitt said. “And we just know that car culture and the center of the world as it relates to car culture is really back east, it’s in the Midwest, it’s a two-day drive from Columbus, Ohio and you have 80 percent of America’s car enthusiasts.
“Yeah, there’s a great amount of car enthusiasts in California, but they don’t go anywhere and they have soccer games on the weekend. You go to a car show in L.A. and it’s 5:30 to 8:30 in the morning at Donut Derelicts on Huntington Beach and it’s over.”
The Summer Nationals drew a little more than 1,000 cars the first year and has grown to roughly 5,000 in more than a decade. That’s still only half the size of the Minnesota Street Rod Association’s annual Back to the ‘50s show, but Pitt expects it to keep growing.
“I want to make this as big as Power Tour is from the standpoint of its veracity and its acceptance and I want more companies and more people to understand how big this show really is,” he said.
This year’s event incorporated Car Craft’s Real Street Eliminator competition – a combination of autocross, dyno and launch box competitions. A braking challenge held last year was scrapped after a Mustang careened off the track and into a cement barricade. Safety is a priority, Pitt said, and magazine staffers worked closely with professionals from the Sports Car Club of America to make sure nothing went wrong at this year’s track events.
The fairgrounds don’t have much to offer these days when it comes to motorsports, but Car Craft makes it work.
“We’d love to have a dragstrip here, we’d love to have a roundy-round track, we’d love to have a demolition derby, we’d love to have a bikini contest every day, but at some point, you’ve got to say there’s just too much,” Pitt said. “People come out, they’re religious about getting here early, they get their spot, they cruise the fairgrounds, they talk to the vendors, they meet friends that they saw last year and it’s a very comfortable car existence.”
He said Car Craft is working hard to keep it that way for years to come.
Go to the multimedia section for videos from the Car Craft Summer Nationals.
August 3rd, 2009 | AMC, Articles, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Event Articles, Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Plymouth, Pontiac
