On Sunday, July 10th, we attended the 29th Annual Mopar Madness show in Langley, British Columbia, Canada. Usually held on the second weekend of July every year and put on by the Vancouver chapter of the Mopars Unlimited Car club, it’s proudly known as one of, if not, the biggest Mopar show in Western Canada.

As far as car shows go, this is a must attend event for us! We haven’t missed a show since 2005. Unfortunately, like with most things, Covid prevented the show from happening in 2020 and 2021, but the club promised it would be back for 2022 in which it did.

The show has always attracted a very strong showing of classic Mopars and since around 2005 or so, it has also attracted a very high number of modern Mopars as well. Almost every year the show has been treated with exceptionally good weather. The show organizers usually get treated to good weather on the day of the show with weather usually being sunny and hot. While the weather wasn’t the greatest a few years back, it’s been consistently good the past few years and this year was no exception.

During the past few years of the show happening, we noticed the numbers had been slightly down in some of the classes, especially the E-body classes. When we first started attending this show back in 2005, there were rows upon rows of E-body Challengers and ‘Cudas. Since around 2012, the numbers of E-bodies showing up started to decline.

2017 had the worst turnout for E-bodies, with only two Challengers in “E-body Dodge stock,” two Challengers in “E-body Dodge modified” and three ‘Cudas in “E-body Plymouth Modified.” Not a single one was entered in “E-body Plymouth Stock” which was very surprising.

However in 2018, numbers seemed to be on the up and up as E-bodies started to turn out in good numbers. 2019’s show had by far the best showing of E-bodies in a long time with basically the entire E-body section being packed with a lot of beautiful examples.

On top of that, A-bodies and B-bodies showed up in higher numbers as well and the modern Charger/300/Magnum classes had their best showings to date. A lot of the classes were packed that year, which we were very happy to see as it keeps the strong momentum of this show going; even after 28 years!

With everything going on in the world, Mopars Unlimited decided to do the 2022 show a bit differently. Rather than have the usual classes of cars parked accordingly, they decided to park everyone together all mixed up. Another change was the voting. In previous years, all of the participants who entered a car in the show did the voting. To make things easier this year, they had club members vote.

However, this didn’t go off without a hitch. Due to a mistake in who was voting for which class, more car owners got a “Your Car Won” card on their windshield then trophies actually existed, leaving quite a few upset owners and honestly led to a very poorly executed awards ceremony in our opinion.

The club did explain that voting and classes will go back to the normal methods for next year’s show, thankfully in which we hope they do. Despite the mishap, we had a blast and can’t wait to attend next year. We did notice car numbers were down a fair bit over the 2019 numbers, probably due to a variety of reasons including high fuel prices and the change of class setup, however the quality of the cars attending were still fantastic.

If you live anywhere in Western Canada or the Pacific Northwest of the United States, you have to come to this show at least once. It’s a show we at Mopar Connection Magazine have marked on our calendars year after year and one we will never miss. We already can’t wait for next year’s event!

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