Location: Rosemount, Minn.

Want to see your car on Minnesota Motorhead? Send a photo with the make, model and year of your vehicle to jake@mnmotorhead.com. Include your full name, the city you live in and a few details about your car.

The Midwest Mopars club is planning a new addition to its increasingly popular Mopars in the Park show this year—an attempt at setting a Guinness world record for the largest parade of LC platform Dodge Challengers.

That means the attempt is only open to the new version of Dodge’s famed muscle car, or Challengers made from 2008 to today. Mopar will lead the parade with a mystery guest driving a special Challenger, according to the Midwest Mopars website. The driver’s name won’t be released before the event, so you’ll have to be there to find out who it is.

All LC Challenger owners are invited to participate in the record attempt, which will take place June 4, the first of the show’s two days. If you want to join the group, use class code 4200 on the registration form.

This year’s show will also feature a display dedicated to 1971 Mopars, a swap meet, a burnout contest, a model contest and more. All Mopar makes and models are welcome to participate in the event, which will again be at the Dakota County Fairgrounds in Farmington. To register, or for more information, click here.

Car Craft magazine’s annual street-machine event returned to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds July 16-18, drawing thousands of cars and spectators on a steamy, stormy weekend.

Muscle-era vehicles have long been the mainstay of the Car Craft Summer Nationals and they were not in short supply this year, but the event also featured plenty of newer cars as well as old-school street rods and classics. The event’s always popular burnout competition was back, as was the dyno challenge, the launch-box competition and a longer version of the autocross.

The Minnesota Street Rod Association’s 37th annual Back to the ’50s weekend June 18-20 featured nearly 12,000 registered street rods, customs and classics and drew more 100,000 spectators to the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.

As if that wasn’t enough, more than 350 vendors and exhibits, live music, loads of fair food, a Mecum-hosted auction and a huge swap meet added to the hoopla.

Here is a tiny sampling of this massive event, which gets bigger and better each year.

Go to msra.com for more information on Back to the ’50s and stay tuned for details on next year’s show!

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.

Mark Brandow was kind enough to take me on a tour of his business, Quality Coaches at 20 W. 38th Street, which he founded in the ’70s and moved to it’s current location in 1985. Quality Coaches is a full-service shop for vehicles of all kinds, but Brandow’s specialty is British cars – he even lists the niche on his business card.

MGs, Morgans, Mini Coopers and the like are commonplace in Brandow’s shop. Almost all of them are in for restoration or repair of some kind, though Brandow treats them as his own.

“All of these cars have a history and a story and some of them are very close to people’s hearts,” he said.

Brandow shared some of those stories and took me for my first ride in a British speed machine – a V8-powered ’98 Morgan roadster that had no trouble smashing me against the seat back during a full-throttle launch onto I-35W.

Check out the photos for a glimpse inside Quality Coaches, then go see it for yourself. For more info, visit http://www.quality-coaches.com.

It was no Back to the ’50s, to be sure, but the Gopher State Timing Association’s 53rd annual Rod & Custom Spectacular held March 28-29 offered a great taste of what’s to come as the weather warms up (I’m talking about the cars here, though the mini doughnuts were good, too).

More than 100 customs, hot rods, street machines and other vehicles crammed into the coliseum over the weekend. Check out the photos for some of the show’s highlights.

It won’t be long before the fairgrounds starts hosting outdoor shows again. Spring has arrived!

From big-buck customs to immaculately restored muscle cars to home-built traditional rods, the field was diverse. A few celebrity cars – Chip Foose’s P32 rod, the Speed Racer Mach 5 and the original and new KITT from Knight Rider – were also on display.

For those who care about the hardware, Gordon Peters’ ’56 Chevy Handiman took the Bob Hall Memorial Award and John Pasik’s ’56 Chevy two-door won the Minnesota’s Finest Award.

If you missed the show, check out the photos for some highlights.

Feature photo: The purple, chopped and channeled ’29 Ford belongs to Robert Gullickson of Forest Lake.

Location: Burnsville

Cool stuff: 5.7-Liter Hemi making 404 hp and 398 lb-ft of torque, 6-speed manual Tremec TR-6060, Anti-Spin differential, 3.92 gears, 20-inch wheels, leather and a bunch of other options.

Want to see your ride on Minnesota Motorhead? Send a photo with the make, model and year of your vehicle to jake@mnmotorhead.com. Include your full name, the city you live in and a few details about your car.

Location: Minneapolis, MN

Want to see your ride on Minnesota Motorhead? Send a photo with the make, model and year of your vehicle to jake@mnmotorhead.com. Include your full name and the city you live in.