2025 Toronto Motorama celebrates 10th anniversary—and 50th

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Toronto’s annual custom-car expo, the Motorama Custom Car & Motorsports Expo, celebrated not one, but two anniversaries in 2025: Motorama itself kicked off in 2015, making this the 10th anniversary of the show proper; but the event directly traces its roots to the Motion Custom Car Show launched by “Dizzy” Dean Murray in March 1975, and so the Motorama coordinators marked this year’s event as a sort of 50th anniversary as well.

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The traditional Toronto early-March custom-car event has gone through numerous iterations since its start under that Motion banner. For a while, it was known as Performance World, and then MegaSpeed. It was the long-time venue for these exhibitions, the International Centre in Mississauga, that in 2014 suggested combining the annual hot-rod extravaganza with the racing-focused Canadian Motorsports Expo, also held in the International Centre. And so in March 2015, they did, launching the Motorama Custom Car & Motorsports Expo, running this year over March 7, 8, and 9.

As is often the case, Motorama will play host to a handful of incredible guests and celebrities, chief among them renowned car customizer Chip Foose, who was scheduled to attend the 2020 Motorama before the cancellation of that year’s event; and the “Rust Bros,” Mike Hall and Avery Shoaf, who in 2024 road-tripped a ’68 Chevrolet Chevelle to Toronto from B.C. through the snow and slush.

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For 2025, organizers once again filled the front ‘Grand Hall’ with about two dozen absolutely incredible custom cars and classics from all over Canada and the U.S. If you’re looking for a measure of their caliber, consider that two of the vehicles you’ll see on display were just the weekend prior part of the specially selected “Great Eight” octet of cars vying for the Ridler trophy at the Detroit Autorama, arguably the most prestigious award in hot-rodding.

(That’s the wild Bobby-Allison-NASCAR-inspired 1970 Chevrolet Monte Carlo of Ontario’s own John Ayers, which counts among its numerous mods a modern LS engine, a carbon-fibre roof and ground effects, laid-back A-pillars, and a restyled rear end; and the 1937 Chevrolet ‘502 SS’ of John and Alex Farrow, a 10-year build coordinated by Lowdown Hot Rods out of Cambridge, Ontario.)

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This author’s personal favourites included the 1926 Ford hot rod dubbed “Poison Ivy” by owners Mario and Kendra Calleja, a masterfully executed example of the traditional ’60s hot-rod style; the Rallye Red factory-spec-restored 1970 Plymouth AAR ‘Cuda of Nova Scotia’s Rollie MacDonald; and the incredible 1959 Autobianchi Bianchina Transformabile of Ronnie Fortune, a car that’s already a treat in stock form, never mind after it’s been chopped and overhauled with a 13B rotary.

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Those cars and everything else in the front hall were eligible to be named the event’s Grand Champion, and take home the coveted best-in-show trophy. In fact, moving to the second hall you’d find 10 former Motion-Performance World-MegaSpeed-Motorama Grand Champions, a fantastic throwback the organizers had put together as part of the aforementioned 10th and 50th anniversary celebrations.

It was in this hall, too, you’d find several featured builds and builders, among them Fugitive Custom Cars of Guelph, Ontario, which had set up a delightfully silly display that invited show-goers to poke their heads through a hole to glimpse a hidden polished-bare-metal Jaguar D-Type replica the shop’d completed. Last year, Fugitive wowed crowds with “Bat Gas,” an also-unpainted Adam-West-era-Batmobile-inspired gasser build, but for 2025, proprietor Jason Roberts also brought along “Bruce’s Tow Vehicle,” another 800-horsepower Batmobile replica he hopes to actually use to tow Bat Gas around this summer.

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Also on deck was a 1984 Jeep Honcho used in the 1996 blockbuster movie Twister, one of four built by the film’s production team—and one of two surviving. The screen-used truck is coming off of a recent full restoration to its condition as captured on celluloid.

Motorama organizers also snuck a row of vintage gassers into the second hall, as the straight-axle performance machines of the ’50s and ’60s seem to be coming back in vogue. Check out this author’s fave, a ’56 Chevy dubbed “Snot Rocket,” in the gallery above.

Finally, at the very rear of the building you’ll find what Motorama calls “Mayhem… in the Backroom,” a veritable smorgasbord of tuners, lowriders, “bombs,” rat rods, and some customs that just elude classification. Take for example the Plexiglas-canopied little red three-wheeler originally built in the ’50s by Manitoba aviation pioneer and restoration expert Bob Diemert, who passed away just over a year ago. His out-of-this-world trike, today powered by an ’81 Suzuki motorcycle engine, once saw use as a chase car during experimental flights of his own homebuilt military aircraft prototype; it’s now in the care of Toronto collector Roger DeSouza.

Toronto’s Motorama is just an absolute draw for off-the-wall builds like that, not to mention high-dollar hot rods, high-horsepower racing machines, and just about every type and genre of custom car you can name. For 2025, the show runs March 7, 8, and 9, and general admission tickets go for about $25.

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