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Cars and Coffee Irvine auto show closes shop

Auto enthusiasts enjoy the last Cars and Coffee event in Irvine.
(Matt Morrison/Daily Pilot)
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Irvine’s weekly Saturday morning automobile extravaganza Cars and Coffee has folded up its proverbial tent and is on hiatus for the foreseeable future.

The announced Dec. 27 finale was canceled after last week’s gathering drew the largest crowd in the eight-year history of the event in Irvine. An estimated 1,000 privately owned show cars crowded three office park lots beyond capacity for what visitors believed was the second-to-last Cars and Coffee.

Since 2006, owners of hundreds of specialty vehicles have paraded in at sunrise to show off their personal slice of American and international car culture for thousands of enthusiasts at the shared corporate office parking space of Ford Motors, Mazda and Taco Bell. The site is on Gateway Avenue between Irvine Center Drive and the I-5 freeway.

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Saturday, about 400 more cars than is typical showed up, with the overflow spilling across the street to fill the lot for a recently opened Marriott Courtyard hotel. Speculation circulating in automotive forums in recent weeks indicated the shutdown was orchestrated by the Irvine Co., which owns the adjacent property where the hotel is located and apartment complexes are under construction.

“Not the case,” insisted Cars and Coffee host John Clinard, a Ford special events representative who has functioned as the unofficial event’s coordinator since it moved from Crystal Cove in October 2006. “This is our own internal decision. We’ve outgrown it; we can’t continue doing it here.”

“We’ve been looking for three months to find another location to accommodate the size of this and haven’t had success,” explained Clinard. “It would be nice to keep it as local as possible.”

Roaming among the acres of vintage vehicles, classic custom muscle cars and modern exotic machinery, gearheads from all over Southern California and beyond have made Cars and Coffee their early-morning weekend ritual.

“This is like the top-of-the line one. You see custom cars, a million dollar Bugati, a half-million dollar Lamborghini,” observed Noah Mandel, a regular visitor from San Marcos, where he operates an online auto blog MillionaireCarClub.com from his home.

“You meet just great people that own exotic cars and people like you who just love cars, just have a passion for it,” he said. “The sad part is it’s not going to be this big and this huge and this amount of good cars in one place at one time unless they continue this in another location.”

Every make of automobile imaginable — and some you couldn’t have imagined — were on display Saturday. An array of sleek, foreign sports cars by the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Alfa Romeo lined up next to finely restored Detroit muscle cars, including Shelby Cobras, custom Camaros, and the 1970 Olds 442 convertible Indy pace car replica proudly shown by Julius Bognar of Irvine.

“The cool thing is you’ll never know what comes through the line,” said Bogner, 75, who’s attended Cars and Coffee regularly for years. He mentions the unrestored Tucker sedan that rolled through the lot a couple years back, noting it was one of only 48 ever manufactured. “How many times do you get to see one of those? You know, it’s just a unique experience.”

Auto shop teacher Casey Moir held court, telling the story behind the rusted ’64 Chevy van customized by his students at nearby El Toro High. The chopped down “Rat Rod” has a huge engine in the rear, pieced together with salvaged parts. Students used the transmission from a boat and gas cap off a World War II B-14 bomber.

“A Rat Rod’s kind of this car that doesn’t necessarily look very good,” Moir explained, “but mechanically, it’s got a lot of history to it.”

The all-volunteer organizers are optimistic that Irvine Cars and Coffee will be revived as soon as possible.

“The Great Park would make sense. Our concern is just infrastructure,” Clinard said.

He added that although the Irvine event may be in neutral, the engine is still running.

“Because this is the first one and the biggest, it’s in the eyes of the world,” Clinard said, mentioning there are now about 100 Cars and Coffee gatherings around the globe, including a chapter that opened last year in Tehran, Iran.

“It’s an institution that we’d like to see continued in some fashion. We just have to see if it’s possible.”

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