Billetproof organizer puts traditional rod and custom show series up for sale

Photo courtesy Billetproof.

After a decade and more than doubling the number of Billetproof traditional rod and custom shows, organizer and owner Alan Galbraith announced that he’s putting “the world’s least important car show” up for sale.

“The past 10 years running the show have been such an amazing good time that I know I’ll miss it, but I know the new caretaker will have even more fun,” Galbraith wrote on the show’s Facebook page, noting that spreading stage-three colon cancer has made it difficult for him to stay involved with the show series. “While my prognosis is good, I would like to pass the show along to someone with the enthusiasm and energy that the shows and races deserve.”

Founded in 1997 by Kirk Jones and Jay Ward, the show – which restricts admission to 1964 and earlier cars sans visible billet aluminum (thus the name), digital gauges, and other items or aesthetics deemed non-traditional – grew with the traditional rod and custom movement as it expanded from a single annual event in the San Francisco Bay Area to a second in Detroit.

“What’s defined Billetproof – the car clubs founded on the premise that the first postwar hotrodders got it right, the rockabilly bands that combine punk roots with early rock-n-roll, the pinstripers and artists and graphic designers who created the Low Brow movement and the cars built by hand and by friends in midnight garages – has remained a constant” since the show’s inception, Dan Stoner wrote a few years ago. “Its ability to attract some of the best of what this underground car culture has to offer has never really diminished.”

After Ward stepped aside in 2002, Jones sold the rights to the Billetproof name to Galbraith in 2007. Galbraith, the son of a late 1940s Southern California hot rodder, quit his job specifically to run the show and made good on promises to expand the series by eventually adding shows in Florida and Washington state and an annual drag racing event.

Galbraith did not include an asking price for Billetproof in his announcement.

This year’s schedule includes upcoming shows in Milan, Michigan; Chehalis, Washington, and Antioch, California; the drags outside of Toutle, Washington; and a completed show in Ocala, Florida. For more information, visit Billetproof.com.