Verdugo Park fills up fast on the first Sunday in June. By the time our team finished setting up on June 7, the lawn was already filling with the two hundred plus cars that show up every year for Cars for Cops & Kids, and the line of people waiting to get in stretched down Cañada Blvd. This was the ninth running of the show, and in that time the Rotary Club of Glendale has put more than $350,000 back into at risk youth programs across the city, which is a number worth sitting with for a second when you consider it started as a car show in a park.
We came with the new forged and two piece designs, because there is a limit to what a product photo can tell you about a wheel. Face profile, the way a finish catches light, how much material actually sits behind a spoke: those things land differently when the car is three feet in front of you and you can crouch down and look. Our shop S550 GT350R anchored the display on forged TEN-R, which remains one of the more satisfying fitments we do. The R leaves the factory with a wider rear track than a standard S550, so it accepts a genuinely aggressive staggered setup without fender work or a stack of negative camber to make it clear.
Parked around it, the same TEN-R design showed up on cars that could not be more different from each other. A Mercedes-AMG S 63 ran it, and so did a C7 Audi S6, and watching people walk from the Mustang to the Audi to the Benz and register that it was the same wheel each time is exactly why we bring builds instead of a catalog. Then the two piece cars, a G80 M3 and a Race Red S550 GT, both on forged two piece TEN-R. That construction is where the fitment conversation gets genuinely interesting, since a separate face and barrel means we can move offset and lip depth in small increments and land on the spec a car actually needs for its ride height and tire, rather than choosing the closest monoblock offset and living with it.
The rest of the park kept us walking. A built 240Z drew people in all morning, there was an E39 M5 on BBS that looked the way an E39 on BBS is supposed to look, and someone brought out an E46 M3 wearing Hamann wheels, which is a period correct pairing you almost never see in the metal anymore.
What keeps us coming back to this one is not the car count. Proceeds from the show benefit local organizations including the Glendale Youth Alliance, and our president, Edgar Khechumyan, went through GYA himself more than thirty years ago. Standing in a park in the city he grew up in, handing out swag next to a program that helped shape him three decades earlier, is about as close to a full circle as a car show gets.
Chief Robert William stopped by the tent too, the way he does every year. At the time of the show he was serving as interim chief, and a few weeks later the City Council appointed him permanently as Glendale’s 21st chief of police and the first Armenian-American to lead the department. He is also a Glendale High graduate, which means Edgar and Robert walked the same hallways before either of them had any idea where they would end up. Seeing someone from your own neighborhood rise to that post is a particular kind of proud, and it is the reason this show feels less like a sponsorship and more like a family reunion with better parking.
If something at the show caught your eye and you want to sort out specs for your own build, our fitment team will work through it with you.
