A Cooked-Clutch Vector, a Petersen Trabant and Free Admission: RADwood NorCal Goes After Dark

A purple Vector M12 cooked its clutch after one run. A tiny Autozam dressed as a Ferrari F40 dressed as a Mazda Le Mans racer kept lapping without complaint. An Apple II hooked to a tow vehicle's 110-volt outlet generated random cars for anyone who walked up. That is RADwood NorCal 2026 in three sentences, and it all happened at historic Alameda Point with the San Francisco skyline behind it.

Hagerty's celebration of 1980s and 1990s car culture returned to the Bay Area on Saturday, October 24, at the Gold Bar Hangar at historic Alameda Point. This year's version came with three changes the organizers pitched hard: it was free with advance registration, it moved to an evening slot from 4 to 8 p.m., and it added cars actually driving.

Free, after dark and moving

RADwood has always been about period-correct cars and period-correct people, and the formula did not change: hundreds of cars, trucks and motorcycles from the era, Bay Area food trucks and a Raddest Dressed contest for the best era-appropriate outfit. What did change was the price and the pace. Hagerty billed the free ticket as a $25 value, opened the gates an hour early to Hagerty Drivers Club members, and built the evening around Wheels in Motion, a driving exhibition with significant cars of the era making full-throttle passes against the skyline.

“

RADwood exists because driving enthusiasts crave real experiences and community.

"For 2026, we cranked it up!" Burns said in Hagerty's announcement. "It's everything you love about the '80s and '90s, minus the dial-up."

The class list showed where the scene's energy is. Hagerty listed Kei Cars, Tuners, Movie Cars and Mustang vs. Camaro, plus a new Millenia class covering 2000 to 2010. That last one matters: RADwood was built on 1980 to 1999, and opening the door to Y2K-era cars means the first wave of import tuner cars, and the generation who grew up on them, now has a home at the show.

The Millenia class is the change with the longest tail. RADwood built its identity on 1980 to 1999, the era of pop-up headlights, digital dashes and boxy hatchbacks. Opening a class to 2000 to 2010 brings in the cars a younger crowd actually grew up with, and the Kei Cars and Tuners classes already pointed in that direction. For a show that runs on nostalgia, letting the nostalgia window move forward is how it stays alive.

Hagerty also booked a headliner. Mix Master Mike, the Bay Area-born three-time DMC World DJ Champion, co-founder of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and longtime DJ for the Beastie Boys, was announced to play a free set. Pioneer signed on as sound partner for period tunes, and Goodyear was the presenting sponsor.

What the night looked like

The Autopian brought two cars for Wheels in Motion and wrote up the night two days later. Its purple Vector M12 "cooked its own clutch right after the first run," Jason Torchinsky wrote, which held it to four runs. "I can't say I'm shocked," he added. The 787bb, an Autozam dressed as an F40 dressed as a Mazda racer, driven by colleague Mercedes, did lap after lap without trouble.

The Autopian's write-up is a good snapshot of what RADwood draws now. A first-generation Toyota MR2 with a supercharged Sienna V6 swapped in, built by a reader for his dad, showed up. A Trabant wagon from the Petersen Museum rode to the event on the same transport as the Vector. Torchinsky gave away 5.25-inch floppy disks of randomly generated cars made on an Apple II, the whole setup powered by the 110-volt outlet in the Autopian's Mazda CX-90 tow vehicle.

The night before, the outlet's reader meetup collected what Torchinsky called a salon des refusés of cars that did not make the RADwood cut, including a 1974 Super Beetle with an 1,808 cc engine and a 1984 Rabbit GTI its owner bought from his best friend decades ago and still drives. Other cars in his roundup ran from an Oldsmobile Silhouette minivan and a turbo-swapped Vanagon to a Nissan Axxess, a Fiat Strada and a Ferrari Testarossa.

The rest of the Autopian's roundup reads like a list of everything that makes this scene fun: a Volkswagen Vanagon with a 1.8-liter turbo swap, a restored Citroën H-Van, a 1981 Honda Accord, a Mercedes W123 wagon and a nearly identical sibling of the 375,000-mile taxi the outlet had driven across the country. One reader, Nathan, opened the back of his BMW E39 wagon to show 3D-printed model cars he had designed by hand, which Torchinsky called "staggeringly detailed." Not every car cooperated: an RX-7 refused to start when it was time to leave before eventually driving off under its own power.

Why free matters

RADwood's appeal has always been the everyday cars of the 1980s and 1990s sharing space with the poster cars. As the event has grown under Hagerty, keeping it accessible is the challenge. Making it free, running it after work on a Saturday, and putting cars in motion pushes the other way. The crowd was big, the speakers were loud, and, by Torchinsky's account, it was "a blast."

"Car culture is still thriving," he concluded. On an Alameda tarmac with a cooked-clutch Vector, a Trabant and a supercharged MR2 in the same lot, it was hard to argue.