Event Happening: The Goodguys/Speedway Day In The Hay

On Saturday, June 17, the Goodguys Rod and Custom Association brings its third annual Day in the Hay to Lincoln, Nebraska’s North Haymarket district with Speedway Motors, expecting more than 1,000 hot rods, customs, and muscle cars built through 1972 if last year is any guide. The organization behind it began with about 650 cars in a Pleasanton, California fairground in 1983 and now stages 15 national shows for more than 70,000 members. Read on for how a single parking-lot show grew into a downtown Lincoln institution.

Downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, is not where most people would expect to find more than a thousand pre-1973 hot rods, customs, and muscle cars packed into a single Saturday. Yet that is exactly what the previous year’s event delivered, and on June 17 the Goodguys Rod and Custom Association was set to do it again with the third annual Day in the Hay, put on with Speedway Motors in the North Haymarket Festival and Sports District. The show itself is a one-day affair. The organization behind it, though, started in a California fairground parking lot more than three decades earlier with a few hundred cars and no plan to go national. How did that turn into a show in downtown Lincoln?

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One Saturday in the Haymarket

The Day in the Hay lands on Saturday, June 17, in the North Haymarket Festival and Sports District, a downtown venue rather than the fairground setting most Goodguys events use. The formula is simple: cool cars, cool people, and, as the original announcement put it, infinitely good times. If the previous year is any guide, the event brings more than 1,000 candy-colored and chromed hot rods, customs, classics, muscle cars, and trucks built through 1972 into the heart of Lincoln. For a city of Lincoln’s size, a thousand-car show in the downtown core is a genuine spectacle.

Speedway Motors: The Hometown Partner

The Speedway Motors name on the event is not a coincidence. The company was founded in Lincoln in 1952 by Bill Smith, known throughout the hobby as Speedy Bill, and grew from a small speed shop into one of the largest performance and street rod parts suppliers in the country, all while staying headquartered in Nebraska. Speedway also operates the Museum of American Speed in Lincoln, which houses one of the most significant collections of racing engines and hot rod history anywhere. Pairing a Goodguys show with the company that put Lincoln on the hot rod map makes the Day in the Hay feel like a homecoming.

Where Goodguys Came From

The Goodguys Rod and Custom Association traces back to a single event in 1983, when Gary and Marilyn Meadors staged the All American Get-Together at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, California. Roughly 650 cars showed up that Saturday in March. Nothing about that first show suggested a national organization was coming. It was a regional gathering of hot rodders in a parking lot, the same kind of event that happens in hundreds of towns every year, and the Meadors could easily have left it there. Instead, the turnout convinced them that the demand went far beyond Northern California.

Going National in Four Years

Within four years of that first Pleasanton show, Goodguys went national, staging ten events across the country in 1987. That expansion is what separated it from every other local rod run. Rather than growing one event, the Meadors replicated the format in new regions, bringing the same style of show to hot rodders who had never traveled to California. Today the association is the largest of its kind in the country with more than 70,000 active members worldwide, and the regional shows, like the one in Lincoln, are the direct descendants of that decision to take the fairground formula on the road.

Fifteen Shows and a Columbus Flagship

Goodguys now stages 15 annual rod and custom shows across the country, with the PPG Nationals at the Ohio Expo Center in Columbus serving as the flagship that fills the grounds every summer. The Day in the Hay is one of the smaller regional stops, but that is the point of the circuit. A fan in Nebraska who might never make the trip to Columbus gets to see the same caliber of builds, judged and displayed the same way, in a downtown setting an hour from home. The national scale is what makes a thousand-car show in Lincoln possible at all.

The Vintage Drags Side of the Story

Goodguys is best known for its shows, but the organization also runs vintage-style drag racing that traces back to its first such race in 1989 at the track now known as Sonoma Raceway. Those nostalgia drags gave the hot rod crowd a place to run period-correct cars in period-correct competition, and they helped define the Goodguys identity as a group that celebrates the way the hobby actually looked in its heyday. The Day in the Hay is a show rather than a race, but the same attitude carries over: the cars are meant to be driven, not just parked.

Why the 1972 Cutoff Matters

The Day in the Hay welcomes vehicles built through 1972, which reflects the traditional Goodguys view of what a rod or custom show should contain. The cutoff keeps the field focused on the pre-emissions era, when hot rods, customs, and muscle cars were built from the same pool of big-displacement iron, and it keeps the show from being swamped by modern performance cars that belong at a different kind of event. For a muscle car fan, a 1972 cutoff means the Chevelles, Chargers, and Mustangs on display are the real thing, not later tributes.

A Downtown Show Feels Different

Most Goodguys events take place at fairgrounds or expo centers with acres of parking, so the Haymarket setting gives the Day in the Hay an unusual character. The cars sit among restaurants, shops, and brick warehouses instead of on open asphalt, and spectators who did not come for the cars stumble onto them anyway. That accidental audience is part of the appeal for a city like Lincoln. A downtown car show doubles as a street festival, and the candy-colored customs and chromed hot rods draw people who would never buy a ticket to a fairground event.

What to Expect on the Ground

A Goodguys regional show follows a formula that has worked since 1983: a big field of cars, awards for standout builds, vendors selling the parts that keep the hobby moving, and plenty of time for owners and spectators to talk. In Lincoln that formula plays out on downtown streets with Speedway Motors, one of the biggest names in the parts business, on hand as the hometown partner. For anyone within driving distance of Nebraska who owns a pre-1973 car or just wants to see a thousand of them in one place, June 17 in the Haymarket is the date to circle.

Why Lincoln, of All Places

The answer to why Goodguys stages a show in Lincoln is the same reason Speedway Motors never left: Nebraska has a deep and underappreciated hot rod culture, and Speedy Bill Smith built a national business on it. The Day in the Hay gives that culture a stage in its own downtown, backed by a national organization with more than three decades of experience filling parking lots. A thousand cars through 1972, a Saturday in June, and a company that has been selling speed parts in Lincoln since 1952 is a combination few cities anywhere can offer.

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