Do you remember Christmas morning when you were only 7 or 8 years old? Old enough to know that there was presents waiting for you under the tree, but young enough to not know Santa wasn’t real? For months you planned the perfect list and were on your best behavior to ensure that Santa would show up for you. You’d drop subtle and not so subtle hints to your parents about what you wanted. Then after a lifetime of waiting, Christmas morning arrived and you ran down to see that shiny new bike with your name on it? That feeling is exactly how the first day of SEMA feels.

People from all over the world spend countless hours building cars, developing new products, and planning for these four magical days in Las Vegas. Today was Christmas morning for the gearhead. Everything you can imagine is on display, in one extremely large building for you.

Our trip started a little bit early on Monday night where we attended the Chevrolet Media Release party. This is where Chevy unveils their new rides and the people who inspired them. This was neat as people like John Force and his daughters, Ron Fellows and even Kid Rock made an appearance to talk about how they all love Chevrolet and helped to develop different cars and trucks on display.

Today we hit the SEMA halls a little early, and ran around snapping pictures of all the beautiful rides before the crowds showed up – in theory at least. These rides are the best on the planet and while each one deserves a month of admiring the fine details, we had mere seconds to stop, focus the camera and click the button.

Even with this tactic to try to bring you killer shots of every amazing ride, we only got a few in before the crowds arrived. Regardless, this SEMA has stepped up and brought out the biggest and best. It’s almost too much to take in. We spent over 8 hours in the main hall, running out of time to get to the other halls or even outside the halls where there is even more cars. If you’ve never been, plan on coming for an entire week when you do come because you’ll need that much time to see it all.

Nonetheless, here we present you coverage from day one, Central Hall. This is where the likes of Holley, Auto Meter, Dakota Digital, CA Chassisworks, Restomod Air and a ton of others in the Pro Touring world are all gathered, showing off the latest, most bad ass products and car on the market.

Enough of our babbling on about how cool SEMA is – sit back and check out some of the pictures with many more to come the rest of the week!