Join John Fortuno aka Fatchance and Lou Gasevski, Exterior Designer for the 2011 Chrysler 300, as they take you through the process of building the ideal vehicle.
Registration Open for 2012
Join John Fortuno aka Fatchance and Lou Gasevski, Exterior Designer for the 2011 Chrysler 300, as they take you through the process of building the ideal vehicle.
Do you know fatchance? Get to know the man behind the most popular modified Chrysler 300c on the planet, John Fortuno, as he tells all about his love for both vehicle customization and his ride. See the wonders he has done with the Chrysler 300c.
Want to know what LX enthusiast, John Fortuno, likes about the all new 2011 Chrysler 300c? Take a look and find out.
CEO of Chrysler Brand, Olivier Francois sits down with John Fortuno of LXForums to chat about the 2011 Chrysler 300 at NAIAS 11.
Posted on: January 17, 2011 – 12:00 am by Heather Heughens
If the Wellborn Musclecar Museum is Mopar Mecca, then the annual Spring Festival of LXs (Spring Fest for short) is, without a doubt, modern Mopar Mecca. 2005 to present Dodge Charger, Challenger, Magnum and Chrysler 300 owners from across the United States, Canada, and as far away as Germany migrate westward to showcase their customized LX and LC vehicles. (LX, for those out there who don’t know, is the designated name of platform shared by the Dodge Charger, Magnum and Chrysler 300 from 2005-2010. LC is the platform designation given to the Dodge Challenger, built on a shortened version of the LX platform).
Spring Fest, however, is so much more than just a gathering; it is THE PREMIER LX/LC (and soon to be LD) EVENT – PERIOD. Enthusiasm for the following year’s event begins the moment the current year’s event ends. Pages upon pages of posts begin to appear at LXForums.com and by the time registration opened on January 1 of this year, anticipation had built to a fever pitch. “Just five days into registration, and we have 249 vehicles registered,” said Spring Festival Organizer John Fortuno. “We’re expecting close to 500 by the end of January and ultimately, we’re planning for 1,000 cars to be present for Spring Fest 6 on March 26, 2011.
Fortuno has been a part of the Spring Festival of LX’s since its inception. “In 2004, after purchasing my 2005 Chrysler 300c, I got involved in the online LX community, he said. Taking on the screen-name “Fat Chance,” John became a staple on the LX Forums. John, and his super-modified 300c (pictured below) are legendary within the LX and aftermarket modification communities.
“The general consensus on the forums was that everyone wanted to get together and do something, a meet of some kind, but no one had any concrete plans. I put everything into motion by selecting the date, time and venue for the event to take place, and the rest is history,” he told us.
What began in 2004 as a four-car meet, quickly grew. Once the event got the attention of Chrysler, thanks to West Coast PR Manager, Scott Brown, attendance more than doubled. From 2006 to 2007 numbers rose from close to 100 cars to more than 300 cars. Attendance continued to increase exponentially from each year to the next, with last year’s numbers topping 600 and this year’s expected 1,000 registrations.
Members of Chrysler’s design, engineering, public relations, and brand management teams all make appearances at Spring Fest, and even CEOs like Ralph Gilles himself are planned to be present, intermingling with attendees, answering questions, talking shop, and taking in the LX/LC culture. Vendors catering to the LX/LC product line come out in droves, the Doubletree Hotel Irvine-Spectrum is sold out, and although the official event is on a Saturday, festivities begin Thursday evening and don’t wrap until Sunday afternoon.
Video footage from last year’s Spring Fest can be viewed below:
“In my wildest dreams, I never expected it to become as big as it has,” John said. “We’d never have been able to put on an event of this magnitude without the support of Chrysler, but it really all comes down to the passion of the people who own and love these cars.”
This passion is evidenced by the fact that, LX/LC owners and enthusiasts come from far and wide. Most drive, often times in groups of a dozen or more cars. A caravan of Chrysler products traversing the highways of the United States is quite a sight, nothing ever made our interstate system look sooo good!
Final destination? Southern California, The El Toro Marine Air Base at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, to be exact. Early on, the event was held at the Chrysler’s West Coast Business Center, but attendance quickly outgrew the lot accommodations and eventually even the overflow lot didn’t offer the necessary space.
The Doubletree Hotel turns into the central hub for all Spring Fest activities and the parking lot could be mistaken for the event itself.
The host club, So-Cal LX http://socallx.com/, coordinates with the hotel and other local venues to pull out all of the stops, hosting a meet and greet Thursday evening, a kick-off party on Friday evening, providing detailing services from OC Auto Detail all day Friday and Saturday morning, and a post-Spring Fest dinner on Saturday night.
With the introduction of the All-New 2011 Dodge Charger, and 2011 Chrysler 300, this year’s Spring Fest is sure to offer up some exciting eye candy. Wheels are already spinning on the forums about new and exciting ways to individualize the newest incarnations of these nameplates and enhance performance. LX, LD, tomāto, to-mah-to, we here at Dodge can’t wait for Spring Fest 6.
Chrysler 300 doing what they do best at the Spring Festival of LXs
On Saturday March 20th, the 2010 Spring Festival of LX successfully celebrated its largest turn-out to date since its official inception 5 years ago, tallying about 600 people and 594 cars. When compared to other national car shows, the numbers may not seem outrageous, but when you consider the fact that the platform the event is centered around has only been in existence for 5 years, the head [gasket] count becomes staggering. A long way from its humble beginnings in the vacant lot behind a SoCal strip mall, Spring Fest has become a massive movement within the LX community that even Spring Fest founder John Fortuno aka FatChance (@1fatchance), himself is amazed by. “That’s one thing you can say about this community,” FatChance remarked, “It doesn’t matter what they do [or] what they drive, they are hardcore.”
FatChance went on to credit this year’s sizable crowd to the entirely grassroots movement behind Spring Fest’s promotion. By relying entirely on word-of-mouth, Spring Fest is able to generate an enthusiasm that is sometimes lost by the bigger, more traditional car shows. As a matter of fact, FatChance is certain that if Spring Fest were anything other than a homegrown operation, it’d lose steam quickly. With the more formal events, it becomes more about showmanship and less about camaraderie – which is exactly what FatChance and the LX community as a whole hope to avoid. “If I tell the owners ‘Oh we’re having a car show’ I guarantee you this thing would crumble down to zero because these folks – they don’t care about that. They just want to go out and see what’s going on…and mingle with [a] community of proud owners.”
Amongst those proud owners were Anthony Carter, Pedro Murillo, and Travis Copenhaver, who we (and hopefully you) were following all throughout the event. Hailing from various parts of the beautiful U.S., the trio of LX fans mirrored FatChance’s enthusiasm for Spring Fest. Tweeted Murillo, “So many cars, so many mods, so many people & a ton of Chrysler/Dodge reps. SF2010 knocked it out of the park. If your not here… ” In case you missed their exclusive coverage of SF5, you can still check out their entertaining tweets by following @1sikmag (Copenhaver), @ezcorpion (Murillo), and @LXandBeyondNats (Carter).
On the whole, this year’s Spring Fest was more than successful in achieving FatChance’s objective of bringing a far-flung “family” together, as evidenced by the striking photos we were able to snap. Hit the jump to check out what you missed, and if you’re the proud owner of a Chrysler 300C, Dodge Magnum, Dodge Charger, or Dodge Challenger, be sure to mark Spring Fest 6 on your calendar next year so you can witness all of the deafening engine mods and dazzling custom paint jobs firsthand.
For more photos, check out Dodge Autos’ official Spring Fest 5 Flickr feed.
