An elderly neighbor one day mentioned to Cary Thomas that his son, Ron, used to race Corvettes. Thomas didn’t think much of it until December 2011, when the neighbor mentioned that Ron wanted to sell his Corvettes.
Ron was ill and in the middle of a divorce. His wife got the house, and Ron got the two Corvettes. The trouble was that they were trapped in a garage; the doors didn’t function, and there was a chance they would fall on the two sports cars. How to get them out?
“Garage door mechanics wouldn’t touch the job,” says Thomas, 65, from Carlsbad, California. But luckily, he went there with five buddies, one of whom repaired garage doors. As they exhumed the cars, neighbors started coming over and commenting, “We had heard there were Corvettes in there.”
The brakes were frozen and the tires were flat, but eventually, they were loaded onto trailers. Thomas decided to keep the 1967 427 coupe. It had an L71, four-speed, and a suspension that had been worked on by Dick Guildstrand. The “gas tank sticker” was still in good shape, and it only had 62,000 miles on the odometer.
“The car had a roll bar; Ron used to autocross and drag-race the car,” he says.
So far, Thomas has oiled down the cylinders and still needs to install new tires and brakes. But he’s going to take his friends’ advice and leave the car as a survivor.
What about the other Corvette? Well, turn the page.
Cary Thomas heard from his neighbor that his son was getting a divorce and needed to sell his two Corvettes. The garage had to be partially dismantled to reveal the booty inside. CARY THOMAS