West Coast Collective

Words by Tim Wong

Last weekend, I had the difficult choice of choosing to attend either the long time running Japanese Classic Car Show or the brand new West Coast Collective created by the same mind behind the annual Eibach Honda Meet. There used to be a time where I’d have no issue with attending multiple events in a single day while traversing several counties, but that particular day didn’t seem ideal to go from San Diego to Corona to Long Beach. So I ended up giving this new event a chance rather than the JCCS show that I’ve been to multiple times before.

The West Coast Collective meet was supposed to be an inclusive event for “imports” meaning the Asian import cars rather than European imports. When I arrived around 11:30AM about 30 minutes after the show had started, I was surprised at the lack of cars along the streets and even more surprised at the size of the show. This was by no means a large turn out whatsoever, but that is not a comment of lack of quality present. I doubt the JCCS event had much effect on this event considering they had a somewhat different crowd of attendees. It could have been a number of reasons such as it may have been the lack of promotion or the late release of the information regarding the event. The pricing of how much it cost to “show” and spectate may have been off putting to people considering it was a just a meet at their own facilities. Possibly, it may have been wise to open the event to any make of cars rather than turn away the domestic or European crowds.