The 1,000,000th Corvette Ever Made Was Destroyed In A Sinkhole, Check Out The Restoration Progress!

When a sinkhole opened up at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky last February, it virtually destroyed several important cars. Among them was the 1,000,000th Corvette ever produced: a white 1992 LT1 convertible.

It was abundantly clear, even just from viewing the cosmetic damage, that the restoration crew had a difficult task ahead of them. A look inside the car revealed that the project was even more complicated than they had realized, but for a very beautiful and worthwhile reason.

The surfaces of nearly every internal part had been signed by assembly-line workers from the factory where the car was manufactured. Hundreds of signatures were present, and that changed the restoration team’s goal entirely. Prior to discovering the names, the plan was simply to replace any piece that would prove inordinately difficult to replace. However, after seeing the signatures, they shifted focus to trying to repair the original parts to the best of their ability, in order to preserve the names of the workers who were part of the vehicle’s history.

There is still quite a bit of work to be done on the LT1, one of three cars recovered from the sinkhole in good enough shape to restore, but the team expects to finish the project in time to reveal it at the museum’s 21st anniversary celebration Labor Day weekend. The task is far from simple, and will require several difficult decisions regarding whether or not to replace problematic parts, but we can’t wait to see the finished product of their work!