By the time that January rolls around, and depending on where you live of course, if you're like me, you've got a combination of cabin fever and withdrawal from our beloved hobby. Also, the holiday season is behind us and we've had about enough of running around. However, there's still a minimum of three months, and perhaps as many as five months before we're back on the road. So, what's to do? Indoor car shows to the rescue and, as we've said before, thank God for them (is that politically correct?).

Indoor events, from the largest to the smallest, always generate a stream of commentary. Either the mix of cars wasn't right, the price was too high, too many "show" cars, too few show cars, too many recycled cars (you know - the ones that you seen a hundred times before). The list goes on. We're an opinionated bunch for sure.

What we don't do often is look at it from the promoter's viewpoint. That is, it's a business and in order to generate revenues from the gate, they do what they have to do by way of the mix of rods, trucks, racecars, late model street machines, and of course, sport compacts. Some of the big "name", North American, events can exist with a more homogeneous mix but many regional events, even in large Metropolitan areas, have to resort to what appears at first to be a weird blend of motorized metal (and 'glass and carbon fibre and...).

What does all of this have to do with Speedorama - Toronto? A lot in fact. It's held in January, it's in a large metropolitan area, it generates a lot of commentary and the mix is diverse to say the least. Needless to say, Canadian Rodder attends in the hope of seeing rods and customs and we did see some. Not many but what we saw we liked. Nigel Herbert showed his new Lobeck-built '32 cabriolet, Peter Duff had a neat '64 Dodge in the show, Chicayne was there (Troy Trepanier built) and we met the nice guys from Ed Belfour's Carman Custom who had Ed's nice '39 and a stout, and nicely prepared, '65 Belvedere.

There was certainly something there for everyone. In some cases, a satisfying amount but not in our case. But, as I said before, you gotta do what you gotta do to make the show work. From the promoter's standpoint, we hope the show was a success because, regardless of our preference, we would like to see these shows continue to prosper.