There’s nothing like spending 5 days, 4 nights in Vegas, walking a couple of miles of trade show exhibits a day, waiting in cab lines, eating tons of food late, going to bed later and getting up early to bend your mind a bit. I guess a lot of the committed bloggers will be doing just that this coming weekend at BlogWorldExpo, but yours truly had his share starting last Sun. and going through the better part of this last week. Yep, Okie went to the 2007 SEMA Show — the premiere automotive aftermarket trade show. Boy, is it ever big! This year I was there representing an exhibitor as their exhibit designer, and also as a buyer for a couple of retail automotive websites.

Airforce One Performance at 2007 SEMA Show

The company exhibiting at the show is Airforce One Performance, an intake manufacturer out in Canyon Country. The fates were with us as the Santa Clarita fires came as close as a block to where their facilities are located and where the exhibit was being finished. Whew!

What’s crazy is how much the finished booth actually looked like the original sketch. The craftsmen at AF1 really stepped up to the plate and hit a home run with this! The framework was made of 3-inch stainless steel tubing, then highly polished. Black carpeted and blue filter-media panels allowed the polished stainless of the products to really shine, while an LCD monitor provided the main signage — a trick that caught the eye from many rows away.

While SEMA is supposed to be all about the aftermarket, when you’ve been going there since ’89 it starts to feel like when you’ve seen one new muffler, you’ve seen them all. So, I’ll post a few interesting pics of some upcoming vehicles for ya. Like this 2009 Camaro gallery. Can’t wait for this beauty to hit the streets!

GM also showed a customized 2008 Pontiac G8, the new rear-wheel-drive sedan coming out soon — based on the new Zeta platform from GM’s Holden division in Australia. Sweet!

The next series of shots is of a vehicle that I had never seen before, not even in pictures. It’s Pininfarina’s 1963 Corvette Concept. It caught my eye and I knew at once that it was a 60′s Italian job, but man, is that fine or is that fine? It will be sold at no reserve during the 37th Annual Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Event on Jan. 12-20, 2008, in Scottsdale, Ariz. so if that’s your thing, bring a Suburban load o’ cash to the auction and go get it!

And then, just to wrap up for now, you always stumble onto a really trick paint job or two, or three, or . . .

Enough of this already Okie! Enough! See, not everything that happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 11:00 am and is filed under Automotive, Okie on the Lam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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