East Bay Sunday – Bouncing Around Blackhawk Cars and Coffee

If you live in California’s Bay Area and you haven’t made it out to the Blackhawk Cars and Coffee event every first Sunday of the month, you’re missing out big time.

We’re fortunate to have so many events like this close to our headquarters in Pleasanton and we make it to as many as is humanly possible.

Around the world, events like this are coming back strong after fading out in the past decade. Plenty of smaller car clubs continued to host similar events, but the massive ones were getting shut down one by one of the years.

You’ll be hard pressed to find a Cars and Coffee meet that’s bigger than this one is; thousands of car enthusiasts show up every month. Of course, any time hundreds of modified, classic, exotic, and stanced cars get together, there’s always the temptation to get a bit rambunctious.

However, that’s thankfully never an issue at the Blackhawk Cars and Coffee. Everyone knows that the incessant revving, occasional burnouts, speeding, and other obnoxious behavior is exactly what got other events like this shut down in the past. And Blackhawk Museum Director Tim McGrane, a proper English gentlemen will have none of it!

As with any event this size, it takes a lot of effort to pull off. A handful of police officers and extra Blackhawk Museum staff help make the huge event possible. To make it even better, the coffee is free! There’s definitely something for everyone here, but of course we were happy to see lots of American iron make it out.

From the twenties to 2018, it seemed all the major American marques were represented. Of course, you just can’t go wrong with vintage American Muscle, but plenty of late model cars caught our eyes too.

Check out this Camaro with Lambo doors and an extremely aggressive aftermarket carbon fiber hood. Of course, the modifications weren’t just skin deep on this car.

As we continued walking through the rows Camaros we came across a Foxbody with something special under the hood. Of course, the nineties “Five-Oh” was a hugely popular engine to swap into sixties and seventies Fords (since of course it’s really just a fuel injected 302), and it’s awesome to see the next generation Coyote V8 finding its way back in time.

There were plenty of other swaps present, like this Firebird with a twin turbo LS3. Talk about moving the needle! A car like this definitely deserves a feature of its own, but every time we stopped by we couldn’t pin down the owner. Don’t worry though, we’ll do some more digging!

Right across from this C7 Corvette we spotted an A80 Toyota Supra, which is probably the closest thing to a muscle car that the Japanese pumped out in the nineties. With big swooping curves, the Supra is a bit heavier and beefier than most other Japanese cars from the era. The mighty 2JZ motor is just 3.0L, but a popular engine to push over 1000 horsepower with a big turbo.

Along with the huge range of cars that were present, it was great to see so many young families at the show too. It’s something the kids will appreciate for years to come; there’s nothing quite like getting up early to go check out cars with Dad.

Of course, with over half a million square feet of parking lot space overflowing with amazing rides, it’s just not possible to get to them all.

We certainly did our best to bring you as many as possible, though! Enjoy the gallery of extra images below.

Blackhawk Cars and Coffee Photo Extra!