CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Antique cars will be rolling into downtown Charleston alongside a Thursday night Live on the Levee.
Live on the Levee will be held this Thursday instead of its typical Friday night event. It’s Veterans Night and the live music event is also being held in conjunction with The Great Race.
Face Value: A Tribute to Phil Collins will kick off Live on the Levee at 6 p.m. and will be followed by The CharlieWest All Stars at 7:30 p.m.
The antique car rally known as The Great Race will get underway before that at approximately 4:20 p.m. Thursday.
Charleston Convention and Visitors Bureau President and CEO Tim Brady said on 580 Live Wednesday that it’s going to be a particularly exciting version of Live on the Levee this week.
“If you’re a car enthusiast, or a Phil Collins enthusiast, or both, Thursday night is going to be your night in downtown Charleston,” Brady said.
Brady said The Great Race makes its way from city to city with Charleston being just one of its stops.
He explained how the rally works.
“So, the way it will break out tomorrow, these guys in these really cool antique cars will be leaving Frankfort, Kentucky in the morning and driving to Charleston in a rally, and they will get to Charleston, they will park their cars, it will be like a pop-up car show,” he said.
Brady said the pop-up car show will be set up along the Kanawha Boulevard where the food vendors normally are, but they will be set up along the side streets for this event.
He said the West Virginia British Car Club is helping the CVB out as volunteers and they will also have their own car show set up on the first block of Capitol Street in front of Sam’s Uptown Cafe.
The car show as part of the Great Race is set to feature 120 antique automobiles.
Brady said the CVB actively tries to recruit different events to come to the city, and year-after-year, they go to business-to-business trade shows to network with event planners and organizers as a way to bring these events to the city. He said that’s how they were able to bring in this event.
Brady said this is something that doesn’t just happen overnight and often takes several years to come to fruition.
“You know, these things don’t happen in a vacuum and they don’t happen overnight, sometimes it takes several years of relationship building with a group to find the opportunity to bring them into town,” he said.
Brady said this was also the case with the USA Cycling Pro-Road National Championships that’s now held in Charleston every May for the next few years as they had to work to get that event to come in.
He said hosting multiple events in conjunction with one another in the Capital City comes by design.
“The philosophy used to be, find your own weekend and plant your flag and try to make sure you own that weekend,” Brady said. “I think that’s a bad strategy from a tourism standpoint, what you want is two, three, four different things happening in the city, because then it makes the city more vibrant for someone coming in.”
Brady said the ceremony for the car show gets underway at approximately 4:20 where the Riverside Color Guard will present the colors and local musician Brittany McGuire will open with the National Anthem.
Awards will then be presented to the best automobiles.
Drivers in the Great Race come from all over the world, all vying for the $160,000 purse.