What is the Goodguys Spring Nationals?
Scottsdale’s hot rod year has two bookends on the same grass. The one everyone knows is the Goodguys Southwest Nationals, the circuit’s late-November season finale at WestWorld since 1998. The one locals know is the Spring Nationals, the season opener, a Friday and Saturday in mid-March on the same grounds, when the first hot rods of the Goodguys year roll onto the polo fields below the McDowells.
Goodguys is the national hot rod association Gary Meadors founded in California in 1983. Its shows are owner-shown and owner-driven: specialty vehicles built in 1999 or earlier, traditional rods and customs, muscle cars, restomods, classic trucks, parked on the lawn with hoods up and lawn chairs out. Around the show rows run an AutoCross course where vintage iron attacks a cone circuit all weekend, a swap meet, a cars-for-sale corral, vendors and food. The 2026 Spring Nationals, the 16th, ran March 13–14 and introduced a two-day format after fifteen years of three; the 17th is set for March 12–13, 2027.
Goodguys does not publish Spring Nationals car counts; the November show claims 3,000-plus and the spring one is smaller. Ticket prices for 2027 were not posted as of October 2026. The last pricing we could confirm, from 2023, was $25 a day for adults, $10 for kids 7 to 12, under 6 free, $10 parking, and Goodguys members save up to $5 a ticket. For a visitor it is the car show that lands in the same March as spring training, ten minutes from the Fairmont Princess, and it costs less than a bleacher seat at Salt River Fields.
Working the spring show
Pick Friday. Friday has every registered car on the grass, a thinner crowd and parking near the gate; Saturday brings the awards in the afternoon and the families, and by 2 p.m. trailers are backing up to the rows. Gates in the three-day years opened at 8 and the show closed at 5 on Friday and Saturday; Goodguys had not posted 2027 hours as of October 2026, so check before you drive.
Getting there. WestWorld is at 16601 N Pima Road, east of the Loop 101 at Pima and Bell roads. From Old Town take Pima or the 101 north; from the Princess it is a two-minute drive. Parking has been $10 and the lots nearest the Equidome fill first.
Inside. Walk the AutoCross first, while the air is cool and the drivers are fresh; it is free with admission and the best noise on the grounds. Then the show rows, which organize loosely by club and style, and then the swap meet and corral, where a half hour teaches you what driver-grade classics really cost. The vendor midway is for parts, paint and shirts; the food rows are fair food.
Weather. Mid-March at WestWorld is a 50-degree morning and an 80-degree afternoon with no shade between the rows. Hat, sunscreen, water, closed shoes for the gravel lots.
Bringing a car. Register in advance on good-guys.com; the field is 1999 and older, and because this is now a two-day show, the All American Sunday rule that opens three-day events to any year of American car does not apply. Trailers unload Thursday and early Friday.
What first-timers get wrong. They treat it as a lesser Barrett-Jackson. Nothing is for sale from a stage, nothing is roped off, and the owner in the chair beside the car built it. Ask one question and budget ten minutes.
A second Scottsdale date, and how it survived
Goodguys had closed its season at WestWorld since 1998, and by the late 2000s the association wanted the same grass to open it. The Scottsdale weather that made November work made March work better, and the Valley’s own rodding population would turn out twice. The 1st Spring Nationals ran March 12–14, 2010, announced on the 2010 schedule as a brand-new event, and it took the mid-March weekend it has mostly kept since: the 5th in 2014, the 7th in 2016, three days with gates at 8.
The pandemic cut the sequence once. The 11th Spring Nationals, March 20–22, 2020, was cancelled in the first week of the national shutdown, along with the rest of the association’s spring. In 2021 Goodguys and Barrett-Jackson, which had pushed its own January auction to March, coordinated their WestWorld calendars, and the Spring Nationals ran April 16–18, its only April, before returning to March in 2022. The 16th show in March 2026 brought the structural change: two days instead of three, Friday and Saturday, one of several Goodguys shows trimmed to two days that year while keeping the November Southwest Nationals at three days with its All American Sunday. The 2027 schedule, published in the fall of 2026, holds the slot: March 12–13.
What the pair of shows says about the city
WestWorld’s calendar is a map of Scottsdale’s economy. The Arabian horses in February and the car auctions in January are the high-dollar events; Goodguys is the one that fills the same grounds with people who drove their own cars in and will drive them home. That the association chose Scottsdale for both ends of its season is a compliment to the weather and to the venue, roughly 380 acres of city-run event grounds with an air-conditioned Equidome, and a reminder that the city’s car culture is not only an auction floor.
The spring show is the smaller sibling and will stay so; the circuit’s finale, with its Top 12 of the Year and its King of the Desert AutoCross shootout, belongs to November. But March has spring training, 75-degree afternoons and a city full of visitors with a free Friday, and the Spring Nationals gives them a reason to drive to Pima Road. For a hot rod fan it is the year’s first look at what got built over the winter, and for anyone else it is the cheapest, most talkative car show on Scottsdale’s calendar.