UPDATE: Sinkhole at Corvette Museum in Kentucky. 8 priceless pieces of history lost

[trike savior]

check it out. pretty sad. I really hope they can save the cars. you can only see 2 in the pics.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/us/national-corvette-museum-cars-fall/

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/12/corvette-museum-sinkhole/5417171/



UPDATE: WATCH IT HAPPEN: security camera video recently released. looks like these 2 land on top of eachother.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=90d_1392239602

[DohcBikes]

The 62 looks like it mightve got the least wrecked, I hope... the upside down 84 won't be pretty.

[trike savior]

None of them will be pretty. It will come down to amount of structural damage. And those with the important vin #'s are not replaceable. Like the 1 and 1.5 millionth produced. Not to mention the actual pace car that paced the race. Real sad. They should keep them on display wrecked if they can't be fixed. Make an exhibit for those cars since this is now part of corvette and the museums history.

[redsox]

i think the ol' vettes heard barry took over General Motors and they tried to escape.

har har har,,,, sorry. ya, it is a shame. tough to see those cars like that.

[ezmoney1979]

They definitely weren't all "priceless". The 62 is the only one that is a heart breaker IMO.

[trike savior]

camexicanadian. LOL you cheeky b@$t@rd

easymoney. the 62 appears to be the only one that was just a car on display. the 62 production #s were pretty high and it is replaceable. although I pray it will be fixable from the pic. I am sure it was a fuelie (Rochester mechanical fuel injection) but there are more out there. all the rest were "priceless" un-replaceable cars because of the vin #, prototype, or real pace car. Even the 93 40th anniversary edition I am willing to bet was the first or last off the production line.

when it comes to corvettes, certain VIN #'s can add thousands if not hundreds of thousands to the value. then comes the rarity of the combination of options that add value.

[trike savior]

also a bit of corvette trivia for you guys.

only year a corvette was not produced since 1953: 1983

my favorite vette engine was the ZR1 in the early to mid 90's. it was a reworked 350 block with twin over head cam cylinder heads. that is 4 cams total. it revs to the stars like a v8 Ferarri and sounds glorious. the bit of trivia. engine was designed by lotus for GM and was built by Mercury marine. that's right, built by a boat engine producer.

[hublake]

Not being up much on Corvette history but why wasn't there an 83 model produced?

[ezmoney1979]

Not being up much on Corvette history but why wasn't there an 83 model produced?

Everyone needed a break from making a decade of garbage.

[SHIFLITE]

That's the best place to put a CHEVY , in a hole....

[trike savior]

hublake: easymoney pretty much hit the nail on the head. GM really had a hard time engineering a fuel injection system for the corvette during the height of the emissions standards increases. the cross fire injection that was the flagship from 80-82 was plagued with so many problems. the cars were constantly being brought in for repairs. their plan was to change the body style either way, but they were torn between using the problematic crossfire injection or release the tuned port injection model that was not ready yet either. so instead of facing anymore embarrassment with the corvette, they decided to just not make one that year and continue R&D. 84 came along and the TPI was still not read so they ended up releasing it with the Cross Fire motor anyway. they updated it every way they could based on the failures they were seeing in the earlier models but it was still a turd. 1 tear later in 85 they introduced the TPI motor which was the flagship for the vette for many years and the later Camaro z28/ firebird.

I have heard other reasons for missing the 83 production year but this makes the most sense to me.

A WORD about how the crossfire injection revolutionized the automotive industry and paved the way for intake manifold design, even today:

if you look at a picture of a cross fire injection motor, you will see what looks like 2 carbs but is actually independent TBI (throttle body injection) setups. similar to the the chevy pickups and early blazers, it was an injector shooting fuel down on a throttle blade. now contrary to what you might think, the injector on one side of the motor actually fed the bank of cylinders on the opposite side. Similar to the old race hemi's that had the offset dual quads.

the theory: most people think that a traditional carbeurated intake manifold with nice short intake runners is best. wrong. What GM started playing with was the principle that an intake runner can be made a certain length so that the pulses of air traveling down it, will actually be accelerated by the pulse in front of it, at a certain rpm.

So by playing with intake runner length they learned they could design a manifold that would flow optimally at the highest RPM the engine would be designed to run at. not that this helped them a whole lot, with all the emissions parts and de-tuning they had to do to be able to sell the car to the public in that era. BUT without it, the corvette could have been a lot worse.

So now that you know that, one can understand the idea behind the odd looking design of the TPI and its later Ramjet counterpart. this caused ford to start toying with the idea on the 5.0 and 5.8 ford manifold. And this still holds true today with the LS series manifolds that power the corvette and so many other GM vehicles

[slashfan7964]

They all will be restored regardless of the damage. GM won't let that history go to waste. Besides I've seen worse cars get restored. They won't be completely mint but they will still exist. This incident is just another chapter in their history.

[trike savior]

UPDATE: WATCH IT HAPPEN: security camera video recently released. looks like these 2 land on top of eachother.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=90d_1392239602

[atc007]

That's the best place to put a CHEVY , in a hole....



:crazy::crazy:Yeah,Chevrolets and Corvettes are garbage :crazy:

[trike savior]

well they are beginning to pull the cars out of the hole. the damage is painful to see but glad to hear they will be saved after they spend a few months on display at the museum. there are more interesting pics out there now than I can post here so take one minute and google search "sinkhole corvette" and then click images. there are also some videos of the cars being craned out. the PPG pace car appears to be have the worst damage yet. there are pics of the 62 but cannot find one of the rear end which took all the damage in the fall.

for those of you who are interested, they are taking a poll to decide if they should leave one of the cars trashed and on display indefinitely. read the article: I agree the 40th anniversary vette should be left damaged and not the PPG pace car, because the pace car is more important and 1 of 1.

http://www.autoweek.com/article/20140310/CARNEWS01/140319991

For you HATERS. they pulled this one out of the hole and it fired up without any work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hzJ9RQn_58

[SteveCZ28]

that blue devil they pulled out, and got started is definitely hurt. took a few tries to get her to fire. and when it moved its definitely bleeding its oil out. poor girl :(

[trike savior]

yeah a 30-40 foot fall will do that to a car though. its amazing it started at all. heck, Porsche cant make a car these days that leaves the factory without catching fire under normal conditions. LOL. Been watching the Top Gear guys giving Richard Hammond a hard time because he bought the new Porsche gt3 that is having the fire problems. and now after telling owners they cant drive them, Porsche has taken it back.

[ironchop]

meanwhile (I live here in BGKY) sinkholes are still opening up all over town...Knowing what I know about living here, I would be afraid to put them (vettes) back anywhere near a sinkhole. We sit right over the mid KY Karst system and Mammoth Cave complex. There`s another classic car museum/dealership right by the Vette museum. They might have an issue there real soon as well. We`ve had a ton of rain this season so there are a lot of new sinkholes this season. Sinkholes don't like to be filled in. They always come back to haunt you yrs later. My sister in law has one big enough to drop a car in right in her back yard.

[slashfan7964]

http://global.fncstatic.com/static/managed/img/Leisure/2009/1-million-vette-660.jpg
http://www.corvetteblogger.com/images/content/2014/030514_35b.jpg http://www.corvetteblogger.com/images/content/2014/030514_31.jpg http://image.popularhotrodding.com/f/hotnews/1403_update_millionth_corvette_rescued_from_ncm_si nkhole/67621153+w640/1992-chevrolet-corvette-one-millionth-sinkhole-rescued-damages.jpg http://www.wlky.com/image/view/-/24822800/medRes/3/-/maxh/358/maxw/538/-/n9oecs/-/millionth-corvette-rescued--1--jpg.jpg http://www.wlky.com/image/view/-/24822806/highRes/2/-/12k7019/-/millionth-corvette-rescued--4--jpg.jpg
http://users.gtpla.net/forum/attachments/1655742_10152668969632977_1911087381_o-jpg.123107/
http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100458359_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100458358_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100458360_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100458361_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100458368_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100458369_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100458370_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100458371_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100459050_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100459047_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100459048_l.jpg http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/chevrolet-corvette_100459049_l.jpg
http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/1962-Corvette-480x319.jpg
http://www.sportscarillustrated.com/img/News_2014/D/14_0391.jpg
http://www.torquenews.com/sites/default/files/image-106/1962_corvette.jpg
http://users.gtpla.net/forum/attachments/13247_10151937346097441_1167830876_n-jpg.124003/
http://users.gtpla.net/forum/attachments/1779786_632490106787885_2003093738_n-jpg.124236/

http://image.gmhightechperformance.com/f/hotnews/1403_ppg_1984_corvette_lifted_from_ncm_sinkhole/69329097+w799+h499+cr1+ar0/1984-Corvette-PPG-pacecar-damage-01.jpg
http://www.autoweek.com/galleryimage/CW/20140306/CARNEWS01/306009997/PH/0/5/Corvette-Museum-sinkhole-recovery-updates-PPG-Pace-Car-rear.jpg http://image.automobilemag.com/f/67646656+w807+h454+q80+re0+cr1+ar0/1984-Chevrolet-Corvette-PPG-Pace-Car-courtesy-National-Corvette-Museum-rear-end-gone.jpg http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wkyu/files/styles/card_wide/public/201403/ppg-pace.jpg http://www.autoweek.com/galleryimage/CW/20140306/CARNEWS01/306009997/PH/0/4/Corvette-Museum-sinkhole-recovery-updates-PPG-Pace-Car-front.jpg http://image.gmhightechperformance.com/f/hotnews/1403_ppg_1984_corvette_lifted_from_ncm_sinkhole/67639273+w799+h499+cr1+ar0/1984-Corvette-PPG-pacecar-sinkhole-lift-04.jpg

[jb2wheels]

also a bit of corvette trivia for you guys.

only year a corvette was not produced since 1953: 1983

my favorite vette engine was the ZR1 in the early to mid 90's. it was a reworked 350 block with twin over head cam cylinder heads. that is 4 cams total. it revs to the stars like a v8 Ferarri and sounds glorious. the bit of trivia. engine was designed by lotus for GM and was built by Mercury marine. that's right, built by a boat engine producer.

That was a cool engine - but I don't think it had any relation to the 350, did it? Lotus based or something like that?

[SteveCZ28]

those are horrible pics. sad to see history end up like that. most of the vettes look like they could be rebuilt. but that pace car looks like a complete and total loss

[trike savior]

jb2wheels.

you don't see much of it from the outside but the bottom end is 350 chevy. they would have paid a lot more to lotus for designing it, if they started from scratch. lotus designed the heads, intake and the modifications to the block and crank to run OHC timing chain

slashfan

thanks for posting pics. you got pretty much everyone I would have chose.

need to find pic of pace car before, they did a custom back end on the car that looked awesome. I saw it on the google search.

check out the rocks still on the front grille of the blue devil.

another bit of trivia.

when is a 350 small block Chevy actually 350c.i.

answer: Never. just like our trikes (Honda atc 90 is 89 cc, etc), though it is called a 350, on a stock bore it is actually 349 and change c.i.

[slashfan7964]

More cars are still being pulled up.


Good new is that every car is going to be restored with oversight from GM's top guys. Nothing will be lost.

[atc007]

Seeing that 93 brings back bad memories.. I built a 89 that was hit on the Passenger front right behind the wheel in the AC box.. That was a LOT of learning :)) That ZR1 is just about as damn fine as a vehicle can get. Unless it's lifted :) Those pics are flat amazing Slash. Thanx

[Dirtcrasher]

The blue and black one seem to have made out best. That pace car is destroyed......

[tanks350x]

Not a big Vette fan but, it still sucks either way..