This past weekend was the Hillsborough Balloon Fest, and on Sunday we had the annual Classic Car Show.   This is the first time I have ever helped with putting on a car show, and I learned a few things.

First, I will say that while there were not as many vehicles entered as I had hoped, although there was more than I expected. I believe the total was 23 vehicles.  Next year I hope we can get the word out in a more efficient manner and my goal will be 40+.

Now there were really only a few problems that we ran into.  1st was we had 2 classes that each ended up having a duplicate car number.  2nd, when it came time to announce the winners and hand out the trophies, all we had were the car numbers; No names or vehicle info. Lastly, when counting the ballots, one of the winners was announced as being classified as being in the ‘pre-1940’s’ category, when he was actually in the 1940’s.

For the 1st problem, we were able to easily resolve it by granting the 1st car that came into the show as the correct one, and dropping the other vehicle.  We of course immediately refunded the entry fee for those two.   This doesn’t solve the issue of split voting (meaning 1 car in each of these classes may have gotten extra votes from the other vehicle), but unfortunately there is nothing we could do about that as there was no way to restart the voting process (voting was done by the public as they came through the show area).  Thankfully the 2 affected vehicle owners were very understanding.  The issue occurred because we have a large surge of vehicle’s coming in at once, and with two people running registrations, and in hindsight, the error was easy to occur.

For the 2nd problem, we simply did not record the info as we did not believe it was necessary.  But at the end of the show, it would have been helpful to have as it would have been nice to announce the owner name and vehicle info.

For the 3rd and final problem, it was easy to work around by simply reviewing his registration card to be sure he was issued the correct trophy.   The only real concern with that was we had to pause while someone ran to the car to retrieve the card.

I have a plan to get around these problems for next year, and it should actually streamline the registration process.

First, we will pre-print a number of vehicle registration cards for each class.  This way as they come into the field, the person registering the vehicle simply grabs the next card in the pile.  At the same time we will have a ledger system to record owner name, cell number,  and vehicle info.  This also has the advantage of if we have a large number of cars come in at once, they can simply park the cars and go back to them afterwards to gather the owner info for the ledger.

Some lessons were learned, and a good time was had by all that attended.

The good news is that we have a little less than a year to put plans in place for next year!