Dad’s day a great day in Santa Rosa to ogle classic cars

For nearly three decades, Sonoma County’s Father’s Day ‘Show & Shine’ has turned a public park into an open-air museum of stock rides, hot rods, rat rods, and low riders. The Engineering Contractors Association-run event skips the velvet-rope treatment of concours shows in favor of trophies for character, like Best Flames, Best Rat Rod, and Best Engine, alongside the usual categories. Free for spectators and open from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., it’s become less about the cars and more about the dads and kids who show up together every year.

On Fatherâ€™s Day, Tor Hansen was being led around by his 7-year-old son, Ripley, as they took in the gleaming collection of more than 300 immaculately restored and cared for entries at the car show at Santa Rosaâ€™s Juilliard Park.

Dad admitted heâ€™s learning more about cars because of his son.

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Every June, a modest city park in Santa Rosa fills with more chrome and thunder than most car museums see in a year, and almost nobody outside Sonoma County has heard of it. For nearly three decades, the same patch of grass at Juilliard Park has drawn hundreds of owners willing to trailer, tow, or nurse decades-old machines across the county just to park them in rows and talk shop for six hours. There’s no marquee sponsor, no televised broadcast, no velvet rope, just an all-volunteer contractors’ association and a tradition that keeps growing every single year. What keeps pulling people back to a free show with a modest entry fee and a folding-table trophy table? The answer has less to do with the cars than with who’s usually standing next to them.

A Show Built by the People Who Show Up

The event, staged at Juilliard Park in Santa Rosa, is organized by the Engineering Contractors Association and has run for close to three decades, growing into a Father’s Day fixture for Sonoma County. Doors, or rather the grass, open at 9 a.m. and the show wraps by 3 p.m., giving families a full day to wander rows of stock rides, hot rods, trucks, motorcycles, rat rods, and low riders parked side by side. A modest registration fee gets an owner a spot in the show, and spectators walk in free, which is part of why turnout regularly climbs into the hundreds of vehicles.

Trophies for Everything Except Perfection

Unlike concours events that reward only the most flawless restorations, Juilliard Park hands out trophies across categories built for personality as much as polish: Best Rat Rod, Best Engine, Best Flames, People’s Choice, and separate classes for stock and hot rod builds. That range means a beat-up survivor car with an untouched original engine bay has just as much shot at hardware as a nut-and-bolt restoration, which is a big part of why the show attracts everything from six-figure muscle cars to backyard projects still wearing primer.

Food trucks and live music turn the judging into an afterthought for a lot of families. Kids climb into driver’s seats they’ll never own, parents debate paint codes, and strangers trade stories about cars they used to have. It’s the kind of low-stakes, high-turnout gathering that doesn’t need a headline sponsor to keep pulling people back year after year.

For dads specifically, the show has become something like an annual checkpoint, a reason to load a kid into the passenger seat, drive across town, and spend a few hours pointing out engines, badges, and body styles most eight-year-olds have never seen up close. That kind of hands-on exposure is where a lot of lifelong car people get their start, long before they ever turn a wrench themselves.

The show’s staying power says something about car culture in general: it doesn’t take a factory-backed event or a six-figure purse to keep a tradition alive, just a park, a few hundred willing owners, and enough curious kids tagging along to make sure the next generation shows up too.

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