Where do I even begin? I honestly couldn’t have asked for anything better… I had an idea a few months back and with the help of all of our friends, family, and sponsors First Class Fitment was a huge success! The venue, the quality of cars, and most importantly the people made for a day I will NEVER forget. We just want to thank everyone who came out to the event whether you brought a show car or were a spectator , we really appreciate the support and we look forward to making this an annual event for Canibeat!
Our friend James Hartey aka Ketchup put together this short film of the event that I think gives you a great feel for the airport, the variety of cars, and the people. Enjoy and we will have more photos and video up shortly!
Dave is a co-founder, editor, and photographer for Canibeat and currently resides in Princeton, New Jersey. He's a business man working in corporate America by day and freelance photographer and do everything guy for Canibeat by night. Also enjoys traveling, collecting sneakers, and organizing events like First Class Fitment.
as an enthusiast and someone who supports the site i have to say i feel a little left out. as enthusiasts having shows that exclude cars because they dont do the stance thing seems a little like social hierchy. excluding people and their cars is not right, we can all do what we love without excluding each other. im a little dissapointed at the way the site has gone towards the stance and fitment segment and is more often leaving out the performance guys and gals. the vibe seems to be like your better than everyone else and thats not the type of people i met at IA. this event was like a form of automotive segragation, and at this point in the hobby thats the last thing we need. remember we are all in the hobby cause we love cars and want to build.
we used to have 1000 car meets here eight or so years ago untill people started acting better than someone else or keeping them out due to their build style. do the right thing with the abilities this site has gained and put on meets that are open to everyone. if you want to do a stance only thing meet up in a parking lot, dont do shows where you audition the cars before they can come. its just not right.
Dave@Canibeat replied:
November 4, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Sorry you feel that way… I can assure you we haven’t lost our love for all different makes and models whether they be performance oriented or slammed and flush. If you happened to read the information we posted about this event, then you would have noticed the size and limited space of the airport venue, as well as our goal of quality cars over huge crowds (like most shows in our area). Then you might have a better understanding of why we chose to mange the show parking through a pre-registration process and why it was not open to anyone and everyone. To put it bluntly it simply was not possible to even accommodate hundreds of cars at the airport venue we chose to host this event. Given that their hasn’t been any events (let alone “stance” events) here in the Northeast that have brought people together from all makes and models. So that is the approach we decided to take with our first event and we the Canibeat team as well as all of the spectators that we have heard from thought it was a refreshing change from the typical “Let’s pack as many cars as we can fit in here” kind of event we have all become too familiar with.
Remember this was only our FIRST event… we would love to have another Canibeat event (maybe a BBQ) in the spring time at a larger location that is open to anyone and everyone.
Trend Killer replied:
November 5, 2010 at 12:52 am
I did read the information, however I still am not a fan of limiting it to stanced cars. there could of still been quality cars that werent stanced included. im all for a quality over quanity event every once in a while, but i think a wide variety of quality instead of just quality stanced cars would have appealed to more people.
still support you guys just not the idea of your first event.
In theory that sounds great, but even with the event marketed as a “Fitment/Stance” event we received over 300 pre-registration submissions. Now put yourself in our shoes, we only had a month to manage the pre-registration process, and Canibeat is just something we do for fun and we all have demanding full time jobs. We had to sort through each and every one of the submissions we received and make some VERY tough decisions. Now imagine if we chose to open this event to any quality car (stanced or not), we probably would have received more than double the number of submissions, and simply not had the time or resources to manage narrowing down that many submissions to just 75 cars. We did however make an attempt to include quality non-stanced cars in the event by having them park along the long driveway entrance which everyone had to walk down, and later in the day as people left they were able to move to the “show” parking.
We wanted our first event to be a success (which I would like to think it was), and we wanted it to be manageable our first time around, not an unorganized, unmanageable, chaos (like too many events we’ve been to). I hope you can understand and respect where we are coming from and why we chose to organize our first event the way we did. Rest assured that next year we will look to host more Canibeat events, and specifically one that is open to anyone and everyone!
I would like to add it was a FITMENT meet. I wouldn’t like to think we have become strictly about fitment on our site but at this point in the import culture it is really popular. I myself always try to find mild ‘stanced’ content to break up all the other content our viewers like to see because it seems to be everywhere else. Stanced this, hellaflush that. I also hope in the future we can host an event that caters to everyone and everything built with a simplistic mindset no matter the fitment.
November 4, 2010 at 3:53 am
as an enthusiast and someone who supports the site i have to say i feel a little left out. as enthusiasts having shows that exclude cars because they dont do the stance thing seems a little like social hierchy. excluding people and their cars is not right, we can all do what we love without excluding each other. im a little dissapointed at the way the site has gone towards the stance and fitment segment and is more often leaving out the performance guys and gals. the vibe seems to be like your better than everyone else and thats not the type of people i met at IA. this event was like a form of automotive segragation, and at this point in the hobby thats the last thing we need. remember we are all in the hobby cause we love cars and want to build.
we used to have 1000 car meets here eight or so years ago untill people started acting better than someone else or keeping them out due to their build style. do the right thing with the abilities this site has gained and put on meets that are open to everyone. if you want to do a stance only thing meet up in a parking lot, dont do shows where you audition the cars before they can come. its just not right.
November 4, 2010 at 1:57 pm
Sorry you feel that way… I can assure you we haven’t lost our love for all different makes and models whether they be performance oriented or slammed and flush. If you happened to read the information we posted about this event, then you would have noticed the size and limited space of the airport venue, as well as our goal of quality cars over huge crowds (like most shows in our area). Then you might have a better understanding of why we chose to mange the show parking through a pre-registration process and why it was not open to anyone and everyone. To put it bluntly it simply was not possible to even accommodate hundreds of cars at the airport venue we chose to host this event. Given that their hasn’t been any events (let alone “stance” events) here in the Northeast that have brought people together from all makes and models. So that is the approach we decided to take with our first event and we the Canibeat team as well as all of the spectators that we have heard from thought it was a refreshing change from the typical “Let’s pack as many cars as we can fit in here” kind of event we have all become too familiar with.
Remember this was only our FIRST event… we would love to have another Canibeat event (maybe a BBQ) in the spring time at a larger location that is open to anyone and everyone.
November 5, 2010 at 12:52 am
I did read the information, however I still am not a fan of limiting it to stanced cars. there could of still been quality cars that werent stanced included. im all for a quality over quanity event every once in a while, but i think a wide variety of quality instead of just quality stanced cars would have appealed to more people.
still support you guys just not the idea of your first event.
November 9, 2010 at 5:34 pm
In theory that sounds great, but even with the event marketed as a “Fitment/Stance” event we received over 300 pre-registration submissions. Now put yourself in our shoes, we only had a month to manage the pre-registration process, and Canibeat is just something we do for fun and we all have demanding full time jobs. We had to sort through each and every one of the submissions we received and make some VERY tough decisions. Now imagine if we chose to open this event to any quality car (stanced or not), we probably would have received more than double the number of submissions, and simply not had the time or resources to manage narrowing down that many submissions to just 75 cars. We did however make an attempt to include quality non-stanced cars in the event by having them park along the long driveway entrance which everyone had to walk down, and later in the day as people left they were able to move to the “show” parking.
We wanted our first event to be a success (which I would like to think it was), and we wanted it to be manageable our first time around, not an unorganized, unmanageable, chaos (like too many events we’ve been to). I hope you can understand and respect where we are coming from and why we chose to organize our first event the way we did. Rest assured that next year we will look to host more Canibeat events, and specifically one that is open to anyone and everyone!
-Dave@Canibeat
November 5, 2010 at 5:32 am
I would like to add it was a FITMENT meet. I wouldn’t like to think we have become strictly about fitment on our site but at this point in the import culture it is really popular. I myself always try to find mild ‘stanced’ content to break up all the other content our viewers like to see because it seems to be everywhere else. Stanced this, hellaflush that. I also hope in the future we can host an event that caters to everyone and everything built with a simplistic mindset no matter the fitment.
November 4, 2010 at 6:13 am
love those teal VS-XXs