Tomorrow may be the very last Import Showoff car show. This is a sad day as it’s an end of an era. For 15 years Import Showoff was the most respected car show in the nation and helped start the import tuning car scene way back in 1994. If you won at Import Showoff that meant you deserved to win and your car was basically the “shit”. Ken Miyoshi, the founder of Import Showoff, helped build a generation of car enthusiasts and helped spark the tuning movement that paved the way for many companies and even careers, mine included. For those that don’t I started as a car show fan turned Tuner and haven’t looked back since. Eventually, my hobby became my work and long story short that’s why I still work in the automotive industry.

This news has given me some new motivation to weed through the old hard drives and CD’s (before memory sticks and thumb drives were popular) to find the images from the good old days of car shows. Car shows including Import Showoff and Hot Import Nights easily took up 3 years of my life, but in that 3 years I was able to forge great friendships and relationships that still exist. So after Formula DRIFT Round 6: Locked and Loaded in Sonoma next weekend I will be sure to post some photos from the Garage Life archive.

But wait, the producers of Import Showoff are back with a new show called “Mega Matsuri” (Mega – Short for Large: megadose, Surpassing other examples of its kind; extraordinary:
Matsuri – Japanese for “Festival” Derived from a verb meaning ‘to attend to’, ‘to entertain’)

Too bad I’ll be in Sonoma that weekend, but if you’re in the LA area be sure to check it out. Car show, car parts on sale, Ruckus, Fixies…