NEWTON DOWNTOWN CAR SHOW

Newton Downtown Car Show Says… That’s All Folks after 15 great years in bringing cool cars and creating an economic impact for the city of Newton.

The car show last May was our final production. The show this last May was an outstanding success and one of the best ones we ever had. The weather, the cars, the crowd, the food, the music, and super vendors all came together to provide Newton a great experience.

The committee wanted to end all of this 5 years ago, but somehow it kept growing and growing at such a fast pace we decided to end it in 2019 at our15th Annual Car Show. It wasn’t uncommon to have 12,000+ visitors, 300+ cars, great 50’s Rock N Roll music and people coming from all over Central Kansas and 18 states. We had cars from Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado and many more. Once we had a gal biker come all the way from Houston, Texas. You may ask how did we do it? It wasn’t easy… We visited hundreds of car shows in our area and handed out fliers and shop rags to thousands of car show folks with an invite to our show in Newton.

We also had great sponsors to help underwrite the car show every year. Some of those were here from the beginning. The first few car shows were much smaller. In 2005 we had 2 blocks of downtown Newton with 80 cars. It seemed none of the downtown businesses wanted us there. We marched on anyway and now many of the merchants will probably miss us.

Were sorry to have to end this grand event. “I’ve tried to interest other groups and organizations to take over the car show, but it takes quite a bit of work and money to keep this circus going and it has to be run the way we always have or it just wouldn’t work” It takes 8 or 9 months of driving to other car shows, keeping contacts, lining up vendors and volunteers, judges, insurance, advertising and this is only a 1 day event. Our budget was around $10,000 every year. We raised that through sponsors and ad sales in the program. I’ll sincerely miss the cars, hot rods, trucks and motorcycles making downtown Newton a very colorful and bright rainbow.

We thank the City of Newton, the City Commission, the city crews and all of our fine sponsors for many years of service they provided. Of course we couldn’t do this without our car show fans and participants. You guys rock!!

It’s a good feeling to come out on top after 15 years. I have a lifetime of memories. So it’s time to ride off into the Sunset and let people know this is all folks!