Where Corvette Lovers Meet
Bloomington Gold is a curious name for an event that has long since
left Bloomington, Ill., where it began, and has nothing to do with
gold. Instead, it's a celebration of the car that defines rapid
transit: the Chevrolet Corvette.
Thousands of Corvette enthusiasts will attend the annual four-day show,
which opens Thursday at the Pheasant Run Resort here, about 35 miles
west of Chicago. Most will come to admire thousands of Corvettes, old
and new. Others will display their Corvettes and have them judged.
Still others will bid at the auction of classic Corvettes, which can
fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"The Corvette is the American Ferrari, the first fast and cool sport
car, and every baby-boomer boy's dream," says David Burroughs, a boomer
himself at age 63, whose early fascination with the Corvette led him to
create Bloomington Gold. In 1973 he took his first Corvette, a silver
1967 Stingray that he still owns, to a show in Bloomington, near where
he grew up. But he deemed the judging to be arbitrary and inexact.
So Mr. Burroughs decided to evaluate Corvettes by how effectively
they've been preserved or restored to their original condition: "no
better, no worse, no different," as his standards specify. In 1978 he
took over the Bloomington show. After winners started calling their
cars "Bloomington Gold," Mr. Burroughs adopted that name in 1983.
That
was exactly 30 years after the first Corvettes had burst upon the
American scene with fortuitous timing. In 1953 the Korean War ended,
Elvis Presley started recording music and Hugh Hefner started Playboy.
Americans wanted to let loose, and a hot sports car was just the thing.
The problem was that the first Corvettes were awful.
They had
wimpy six-cylinder engines and two-speed automatic transmissions that
were more suited to a go-kart than a real sports car. There were no
door handles, so you had to reach inside to open the door. And the
removable roof leaked.
Sales were slow (just like the car), so General Motors planned to kill
the Corvette after only two years. But that drew a vociferous protest
from Zora Arkus-Duntov, a midlevel company engineer. Arkus-Duntov had
been raised by Bolshevik parents in St. Petersburg, fled the Nazis
during World War II and came to America, where seeing the first
Corvette at GM's Motorama display in New York inspired him to land a
job with GM. When he learned the Corvette would be killed, he fired off
a memo: "If the value of a car consists of practical values and
emotional appeal, the sports car has very little of the first and
consequently has to have an exaggerated amount of the second."
Arkus-Duntov proved persuasive. The Corvette got a reprieve, and he
gave the car a sturdy suspension, tighter steering and a
testosterone-fueled V8 engine. Chevy's stylists, meanwhile, added
sumptuous side cove scoops to the 1950s models and rakish curves to the
Corvette Stingrays of the 1960s.
Chevrolet caught a competitive break when Ford added a back seat to its
rival Thunderbird in 1958, leaving the Corvette as the only true
American sports car. Two years later the Corvette played a starring
role in the TV drama "Route 66." And it was celebrated in the 1964 hit
song "Dead Man's Curve" by Jan and Dean. (Singer Jan Berry was badly
injured two years later driving his Stingray near the site described in
the song.)
The Corvette suffered during the oil crises of the 1970s, when its
engine was downsized to just 165 horsepower—less than half the power of
a decade earlier, and about the same as what many four-cylinder cars
have today. But when gas prices dropped in the 1980s the Corvette got a
new infusion of muscle and better engineering. Today's top-of-the-line
Corvette, the ZR1, boasts 638 horsepower and a $106,880 price-tag.
The car has spawned a Corvette cottage industry that includes several
magazines and MidAmerica Motorworks in Effingham, Ill., which sells
everything from Corvette parts to Corvette bathrobes. Several
restoration shops specialize in making old Corvettes like new, often
for a six-figure price. The National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green,
Ky., displays classic cars along with the original copy of
Arkus-Duntov's memo. Also enshrined there is the urn containing the
ashes of Arkus-Duntov, the Bolshevik boy who saved America's iconic
sports car.
America has dozens of annual Corvette shows, but only a few are large
like Bloomington Gold. Mr. Burroughs, a soft-spoken and cerebral man,
is fussy about its standards.
Corvettes have fiberglass bodies, but under their rust-free skins the
key components are metal. Various Bloomington Gold designations are
bestowed only on cars whose original or replacement parts meet the
exact factory specifications. Different judges evaluate the exterior,
the interior, the engine and the chassis. Even a square-head bolt gets
a demerit if the original was round.
"We're in the credibility business," Mr. Burroughs explains.
To the aficionados who attend Bloomington Gold, Corvettes are known by
their classifications: Gold Certified, Survivor and Benchmark—the last
meaning that the car is in near-mint condition with mostly original
parts. Corvettes also have various generations, the C1 through the
current C6, that are defined by major model changes. Among the most
iconic and expensive are the limited-production L88 Corvettes, built
between 1967 and 1969, with up to 565 horsepower. In 2008 Bloomington
Gold featured a special exhibit of L88s, which have "no fussy options,
no other mission in mind but brute force," as Mr. Burroughs puts it.
He adds new features each year to keep the crowds coming, because
revenue comes from ticket sales ($20 a day, or $50 for a four-day pass)
and exhibitor fees (from companies that sell everything from premium
car wax to insurance for collectible cars). No support comes from GM.
Mr. Burroughs has sold Bloomington Gold to Dana Mecum, an auto
auctioneer, but remains on as CEO.
One of this year's new features will be the Great Hall, an exhibition
of historically significant Corvettes, including the prototype
displayed at the 1953 Motorama. "What I want to leave behind is a
documented history of how all this unfolded," says Mr. Burroughs. "How
did this car create a loyal fan base and then became a phenomenon? I
want to show how it all happened."
Mr. Ingrassia's latest book is "Crash Course: The American Automobile
Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster" (Random House). He's now
writing a book about the cars that helped shape American culture.
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