New York Event: Disney Pixars Cars 3 Road to the Races Event at Atlas Park

Mattel Booth

We attended the Disney Pixar Cars 3 event in New York at Atlas Park! Atlas Park is a fun outdoor shopping mall with cool shops, a movie theater, and restaurants. It’s a great place for kids because of high security. The event took place in their outdoor parking lot, and there we met Lightning McQueen, Cruz Ramirez, and Jackson Storm! Unfortunately, the weather was very bad; it was raining and windy. There were flooding conditions through the area, and we barely made it to the event! We persevered and got there to find a ghost town! There were a few other brave families at the event weathering the storm. 

There were interactive booths there that were not functioning because of the bad weather and lack of electricity. The Mattel booth where they had a bunch of old Mattel die-cast vehicles and older story sets to look at (not very fun). However, they were able to get the booth table dry enough to hold some “races.” Another booth there was the Dole booth where they gave out recipe cards featuring characters from the movie. I believe that there should have been some kind of refreshments served at the booth, but they only had the recipe cards. There was also a MAC truck there with a full movie theater! This theater was awesome! We watched a 16 minute short about the making of Disney Pixar’s Cars 3, and enjoyed a sneak peek of the film featuring a scene of Lightning McQueen and Cruz Ramirez readying to race The Crazy Eight race! That scene definitely made us want to see more, and look forward to the Cars 3 movie even more! Three other booths - the Alamo booth, Coppertone booth, and Crest*Oral Bbooth were not functioning due to the inclement weather. Even so, we had a wonderful time, and our son really had a blast! 

Cars 3 opens in theaters June 16, 2017, and may mark the end of Lightning McQueen’s reign as the top racer in the country, but it also leaves room for a bigger story with his trainer/student, Cruz Ramirez. Cruz was sporting some sweet Dinoco stickers on her car at the event, so we can only surmise that McQueen trained her like Doc Hudson trained him. Maybe Cruz got the Dinoco deal that McQueen never took? Only time will tell, and watching the movie, too, of course!

After you watch our video, leave a comment below with your favorite part! There are still some dates available to see this event, as well as remaining days this weekend in New York. Our representation of this event does not reflect the event as a whole, New York had terrible weather on May 5, 2017, so all of their little sponsored booths were compromised. Otherwise, we had an amazing time and had so much fun meeting the life-size stars of Cars 3!