My benchmark for a Ford show in the fall at Beech Bend is painted Candy Apple Red and wears a gold belt around it’s middle. Jason McDaniel’s 1969 Shelby GT500 is a local celebrity in the car world and was featured back when I first spotted the car in 2015. The Shelby does get driven every now and then, but it’s a sunny-day car that the family has owned ever since Jason’s father Donnie bought the machine in 1973 for $800. It was one of the first cars I saw rolling through the gate at Holley’s Intergalactic Ford Fest on Saturday morning and that, in my eyes, is like that unreliable groundhog in Pennsylvania actually getting his weather report right and proclaiming an early spring. It was gonna be a good day at Beech Bend.

From the start, comparisons between the Ford Fest and LS Fest were bound to occur. So to anyone that is wondering, no, it wasn’t as big or bigger than LS Fest. But with that said, for the inaugural event, the crowd was solid and the car show fields were filled nicely. Fans roamed the midway talking to manufacturers, people were checking out other cars in the show fields, and plenty of people were lined up to get a few moments’ worth of time with Vaughn Gittin, Jr. or Cleetus McFarland or the BigFoot guys. It might have been a summer-like day in Kentucky, but at the end of September, that’s not so much an annoyance as it is welcomed. Sunny days and fast Fords of all shapes and sizes…sounds like a good time, doesn’t it?

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