2004 MCA Grand National 
By Lorne Willard
September 2004

There isn't any other way to say it; the 2004 MCA Grand National was indeed grand. And the VMC's participation was also grand. In all, we had 25 cars in the show that were owned by members of our club! Wow! Twenty-five cars for a club over 350 miles from home base! We even won the club participation award (number of cars times mileage).

Hosted by our sister club in Springfield, IL, the Central Illinois Mustangers put on a wonderful show. There was plenty of room, plenty of hospitality, plenty of good weather and plenty of cars and judges. In all, 420 cars participated in the show.

There were multiple groups traveling, some leaving early Thursday and some on Friday.  The biggest group, leaving Kearney, MO at about 7:30 AM arrived at the hotel at about 2 PM just in time for the special surprise from the host club.  They had arranged for the 2005 Mustang that has been traveling around to show up for their and our club members to have a photo shoot with the 2005 and TWO vintage P51 Mustang fighter planes.  Again, WOW! 
 

They even had the local news at the airport as well as a huge bucket truck so the pictures could be taken from the air.  During the picture shoot, Jill and Star were doing their best flirting with the marketing guys with the Mustang to see who could drive it.  Star got behind the wheel briefly at the airport for the first spin of the 2005.  After that, it was time for dinner so a bunch from both clubs took off from the airport headed towards Cozy Dog, home of the original hot dog on a stick.  

We were lead by the 2005 and we were smokin’ going down the highway.  After we ate, Jill got her wish and got to “get her kicks on Route 66” with the 2005 early production car.  One more WOW!  She said it drove really nice.

       On Friday, the majority of the cars headed in together to get spots adjacent to each other.  At this show, they did like we did at our regional and just parked cars by their number.  It worked wonderfully as there were barely any lines getting people parked because they had to have fewer spotters and less places to have cars go.  We all cleaned up our cars and since we were all together, we had a great time.  Friday night’s hospitality was also another good event and we retired to the Bosic’s room for a little after hospitality party.  We had over 20 people in their room (yes, it was a little crowded, but that is part of the fun). 

       They had the first judging meeting on Saturday morning at 10 AM and they had so many volunteers show up,  that not all people got to judge.  Most people had just a few cars to judge so it was all over and done with pretty quickly.  Saturday night, a big contingent met and went to a BBQ joint close to the show site.  

The donuts were really good and the BBQ was OK.  It wasn’t KC style…  We had about 30 people show up and they had to seat us 5 or 6 at a time.  

We then went back to the Willard’s room for the remainder of the evening, with quite a few tired party poopers in the bunch.  Some went to an outdoor showing of American Grafitti at the show site.  I bet they had fun too.

            The Sunday brunch started at 10 AM and the food was plentiful and good.  The host club reserved 4 tables for 40 of us in the second row so we were pretty much front and center.  The awards started at 2 PM so we had a pretty long morning with Ford giving a presentation and MCA Bill Johnson giving his farewell speech after 4 years of service.  The club brought home their share of awards with very few cars not receiving anything.  

            After the presentation, some hit the road to make it back to KC (Dick & Jeanne Lage, the Willards and Francis families headed out together and we caught Gary Hanson and Warner Bartles part of the way home).  We hit some nasty rain and it was slow going for a while.  Others stayed the night in Hannibal, MO and I’m sure they had a better drive than we did.