Traveling Party – Wheel Hub Live Celebrates Its Second Year at the Speedway Motors Museum of American Speed
What happens when you throw a party and all your friends show up? You capitalize on that celebratory spirit and have a bigger and better party the next year! That’s just what Wheel Hub and the Speedway Motors Museum of American Speed did May 24 and 25 with the second-annual Wheel Hub Live event in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Hosted at the spectacular Speedway Motors Museum of American Speed, Wheel Hub Live is like a traveling party combined with a museum exhibition. Over the course of two days, the event incorporates a reliability run, visits to car collections and shops, museum tours, a participant dinner, a morning cars and coffee, a car show, and an after party.
The focal points of the event are more than two dozen vehicles from some of the nation’s premier builders that have been featured in the Wheel Hub family of publications, which includes Wheel Hub, Chevy Hub, Mustang Hub, and Truck Hub. These vehicles were presented in a special showcase in a new wing of the Museum of American Speed, which took on the air of an art gallery event.
That gallery was disrupted multiple times as some of the featured vehicles were removed to participate in other event activities. The first was a reliability run on Friday in which the featured cars and trucks were joined by more than 200 other registered vehicles for a two-lane tour around Southeast Nebraska. The journey led to a private collection in Lincoln, a lunch stop at the incredible Peter Fink private collection of muscle cars in Omaha, and a visit to CAL Auto Creations in Bennington. Friday activities concluded with a participant dinner back at the museum in Lincoln.
By Saturday morning, all the featured vehicles were back in their gallery spaces inside the museum, while the Speedway Motors parking lot filled up with more than 400 cars and trucks for the company’s first cars-and-coffee event of the season. Participants and spectators got an eyeful of hot rod finery both outside and inside the museum. Warm and sunny springtime weather made for an especially enjoyable morning.
The party wasn’t over when the museum closed its doors at 1pm on Saturday, though. It simply moved locations! Participants drove a couple miles away to the Innovation Campus of the University of Nebraska, where there was a big parking lot show ’n shine, plus a laid-back after party gathering that included food trucks, a beer garden, and live music by Through the Years, a great cover band that includes Steve Strope of Pure Vision Design on bass! What a great way to wrap up an enjoyable couple of days.
With the extended Memorial Day weekend, participants and spectators alike still had Sunday and Monday to travel home and tend to other weekend chores or activities. Most will be talking about this show well after the weekend, as it’s the type of gathering that’s filled with the fun and connections from which great memories are made.
Photos by Damon Lee
