Eighth Barrhaven Classic Car Show fills Clarke Fields with 80+ cars all out for CHEO

About 80 cars filled Clarke Fields on Sunday for the eighth Barrhaven Classic Car Show, the one-day show Keith Goebel started because he got tired of driving somewhere else to find one.

Goebel, who lives in Old Barrhaven East, runs the show as a fundraiser for the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. CHEO volunteers were on the field taking donations at the gate, and everything the day raises goes to the hospital. "That's the point of doing anything," Goebel said, when asked why he ties the show to CHEO.

Goebel is also running a silent auction on a pair of Ottawa Senators tickets donated to the show this year by Barrhaven Ford. That money goes to CHEO too.

The show has not always been here. The first two years ran on the pavement at the Fallowfield park-and-ride, and Goebel says the heat came off the lot so hard that owners were packing up by one in the afternoon. "It was so freaking hot," he said. "I didn't blame them." He found Clarke Fields the following year and moved it onto the grass, where the trees down one side are first come, first served. "It was ten times better," he said. Two years were lost to COVID.

What lines up on the grass is not a purist's field. Sunday ran from a 1937 pickup through Corvettes, Mustangs and a long stretch of North American steel to a 2000 Honda Civic, which, at 26, seems too young to qualify, with Datsuns, a Nissan and a Mercedes-Benz among them, plus a few kit cars.

Goebel says the location is the reason it works. Barrhaven sits close to the 416 and within an easy drive of eastern Ontario and western Quebec, and he spends his summers handing out flyers for this day at other shows to get them to come out.

Darrell Bartraw, who helped Goebel get the show off the ground in its first year, was also on the field again on Sunday, in the background making things happen.