RADwood Brings Its '80s and '90s Car Show Back to Tacoma, This Time Free to Spectators

On July 18, hundreds of Reagan-and-Clinton-era cars, trucks and motorcycles filled the lot at Griot's Garage headquarters in Tacoma, Washington, for the latest edition of RADwood, the touring show built entirely around vehicles and fashion from 1980 through 1999. The event, held from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at 3333 South 38th Street, drew a crowd dressed in period windbreakers and neon alongside their Fox-body Mustangs, turbocharged Japanese coupes and forgotten minivans. Spectator admission was free, according to the event's official listing, with paid registration reserved for the cars and motorcycles on display.

RADwood's premise is narrower than most car shows, and that is the point. Founders Art Cervantes and Warren Madsen, two Bay Area friends who floated the idea on their podcast "Driving While Awesome," built the concept around a gap they saw in car culture. "There was a lot of interest in what I call metal bumper classics — pre-1975 and older cars. Then there's also the modern supercar world, which of course, always has a place, but nothing in between," Cervantes told Hagerty. The name itself is a portmanteau, he explained: "we got the word 'RAD' and kind of portmanteau-ed it with 'wood' to get RADwood," a nod to England's Goodwood Revival, the vintage-racing gathering RADwood loosely modeled itself on for '80s and '90s iron instead of pre-war classics.

The first RADwood was a modest affair — a June 2017 gathering at a marina in South San Francisco that drew about 150 cars and 400 people. It didn't stay small. A second show that December in Orange County pulled in roughly 400 cars and 2,000 attendees, and by 2019 the brand was running ten events a year across the United States before crossing the Atlantic for a UK edition at the actual Goodwood estate. The formula stayed consistent throughout: period-correct vehicles, era-appropriate outfits, a soundtrack pulled from the same decades, and judging categories that reward preservation and personalization equally rather than pure originality.

In 2022, Hagerty, the classic-car insurance and media company, acquired RADwood outright, folding it into its broader events portfolio while keeping Cervantes and Madsen on to run the brand. Hagerty CEO McKeel Hagerty framed the deal around who was actually showing up to these events: "Gen X-ers and millennials are drawn to the cars and culture of their childhood, and they represent the majority of our new members." That demographic bet has aged well — cars that were considered depreciating beaters a decade ago, from Volkswagen Corrados to first-generation Ford Explorers, now draw crowds and rising values specifically because they're the cars an entire generation of buyers grew up riding in.

The Tacoma stop leaned on that same institutional backing for star power. Jason Cammisa, a Hagerty editorial video host known for the interview-driven series "Jason Cammisa on the Icons" and for "Revelations," made a special appearance at the Griot's Garage show. Cammisa's career runs from freelance automotive writing starting in 2009 through five years at Motor Trend Group before he joined Hagerty in 2020, and he has become one of the more recognizable on-camera voices explaining why a given malaise-era coupe or forgotten minivan actually mattered.

What makes RADwood distinct from a static museum display is that every car in the lot arrived under its own power, driven there by an owner who is also, by the show's own design, dressed for the part. Griot's Garage — itself a retailer built around car care and detailing products — has hosted the Pacific Northwest edition of the show as a recurring fixture, giving Tacoma its own stop on a calendar that otherwise runs through California, Texas, Florida and the UK. For a genre of car that spent most of the 2000s and 2010s being scrapped rather than collected, that kind of institutional home, backed by an insurance company with real actuarial interest in what these cars are worth, is as good a sign as any that the '80s and '90s have officially graduated into car-culture history.