We stopped by National Street Rod Association’s booth this year and spoke with Jim Rowlett about what to expect for the 2015 show season and for a recap on this year’s circuit. We also got philosophical as he explained the origin of “street rods,” in terms of NSRA’s definition, and the intent of contrasting it to “hot rods.”

“2014 was a good year for us,” Rowlett told us, “Most of the events were either stable or up some. We’re looking forward to 2015, we’ll be doing 10 events instead of 11. We did let one event ago and that was the Ridgefield, Washington event.”

The Street Rod Nationals is the superbowl event for NSRA and Rowlett gave us his impressions on the climate of this year’s show, “Street Rod Nationals this year was 10,211 cars and there were a tremendous amount of spectators. It’s still the best.”

Rowlett continued, “It’s a neat event and if you’ve never been that’s a place you need to go. Any one of the 10 events are fun. We try to keep them consistent, but when you’re dealing with that number of cars and commercial vendors, it is, as far as street rod products are concerned, the same or even better than what you see at the SEMA show’s Hot Rod Alley.”

Being the authority on street rod culture, we wanted to get some background on how the culture from the eyes of NSRA. Rowlett explained, “Vernon Walker Sr. and Gilbert Bugg Sr. had the word street rod added to Webster’s unabridged dictionary back when they founded the NSRA.”

Rowlett explained that the primary motive of the word was to actively differentiate the mill of vehicles that NSRA wanted to associate itself with, “pre-’49 American makes and models that are updated to comply with modern safety regulations.”

Furthermore, NSRA wanted to help reimage some of the negative connotations associated with hot rods that had pursued enthusiasts decades after the 30s, 40s, and 50s. It was great getting to sit down with Rowlett as he gave us the details on the association’s heritage. Get ready for NSRA’s 2015 season, you can head over to their website to check out the full schedule now.