Bugging out at Bugorama

As a another step in the search for the perfect Beetle and also in keeping with our family tradition, the kids and I hit Bugorama #71 in Sacramento over the Memorial Day weekend. Bugorama is a long running series of events with multiple venues in the West including two stops at our local drag strip Sacramento Raceway Park.

The event has three basic elements: a show-and-shine competition, bracket and eliminator drag racing, and a huge swap meet. The swap meet folks mostly show up on Saturday evening to camp out and snag the best deals early in the morning but the show and drags don’t happen until Sunday.

We rolled in on Sunday morning and the event was already in full swing with the show paddock full of beautiful VW’s of all vintages, the drag folks lining up for some practice runs, and the swap meet humming. We managed to get out to the swap meet first where we saw our friend Jeff Lain from the Kaddie Shack (www.kaddieshack.com) doing a good amount of business selling roof racks, his specially tuned Kadron carburetors, and some other goodies. Jeff also told us one of his crew members had picked up a ’73 Beetle the night before for the princely sum of $500. It was pretty rough, but it was a great base for a project and set a nice benchmark for what good starter cars cost. The Kaddie Shack was also campaigning a drag car in the brackets which ended up winning its class so they had a pretty good weekend even if they did have to drive the drag car home while the new purchase took its spot on the trailer.

 

 

We then watched the drags for a little bit and the kids’ favorites were the insane turbocharged Bugs running high 8 second quarter mile times and the two dragsters that dipped into the 7’s. It was amazing to see the sophistication on the fastest cars with awesome fabrication work and obvious attention to detail.

 

 

The final stop was the car show where we checked out all the sanitary pride and joys lined up together in the sun. After looking over all the cars, my direction has changed a bit as the Supers just didn’t do it for me like the Standard Beetles did. My favorite was this blue ’70 Cal Looker sitting on 2-liter Porsche 914 Fuchs style rims. It ticked all the boxes for me so the hunt is on for a ’69-’72 Standard as I am not a huge fan of the later taillight and bumper treatments on the ’73-up cars.

We left the Raceway full of greasy track food and with a huge sack full of swag and t-shirts to enjoy. Great show to attend and next year we will certainly be back with a Bug of our own on either the show field or the drag strip.

More great cars from the show field and the paddock: