00:00 These cars are the holy grail of the Corvette collectors.
00:13 We basically have a museum of Corvettes here every year from 1953 all the way through 1989.
00:21 This remarkable chronological collection of 36 Corvettes has been hidden for over 20 years.
00:28 Originally given away as a prize by music channel VH1 in 1989, the cars were soon bought
00:34 by artist Peter Max, whose plans to paint them never came to fruition.
00:39 The new owners are restoring the vehicles to their former glory and Chris Mazzilli,
00:43 a Corvette expert, is consulting on the project.
00:46 Some of these cars are going to need to be cleaned up, have the fluids changed.
00:50 Some cars are going to need a year's worth of work and some cars are going to need two
00:53 weeks worth of work.
00:56 First we'll start off with the most valuable car in the collection, a 1953 Corvette.
01:01 This car is one of 300 that were made and it's probably going to be worth somewhere
01:06 around a half a million dollars when the restoration is done.
01:09 The crown jewel of the collection, unfortunately for us it's requiring the most amount of work
01:14 and we're putting a substantial amount of money, well over six figures, into that one
01:19 individual car so we think by the time we get done with the restoration we'll have one
01:23 of the most valuable 1953s in the world.
01:26 However, not all of the cars require so much work.
01:29 So this next Corvette is a '66 Coupe, it's one of my favorite colors, this is called
01:35 Nassau Blue and it has a white interior and that's the color combination it came from
01:40 the factory with.
01:41 The paint is not perfect on it but it's a pretty solid original car.
01:44 This next car is a 1964 Corvette Coupe, this car originally was Ermine White but now it's
01:50 painted Tuxedo Black.
01:52 This car also has its original engine, it's a 327 300 horsepower engine, it's the one
01:58 that the car was born with.
02:00 It also has a four speed transmission and that's the correct transmission that came
02:03 with the car.
02:05 So the interior in this car was in pretty good original condition.
02:09 What also makes it unique is it's silver leather and not a lot of cars came with silver leather
02:14 interior that particular year.
02:17 Many of the Corvettes are yet to be restored and are covered in 20 years worth of dust,
02:22 which isn't as bad as it sounds.
02:23 The fact of the matter is the dust is what ended up preventing the paint from being ruined
02:28 so when we start washing these off and cleaning them with the special solution, the paint
02:33 on almost all of them is in perfect condition so that was a pleasant surprise when we started
02:38 working on the first couple of cars.
02:40 When the restoration is complete, how much would the collection be worth?
02:44 It's a very very valuable collection, they're folklore, people know about the cars so it's
02:48 very hard to put a dollar amount on the cars because who knows what the value of Peter
02:52 Max and VH1 having these cars but they're worth a lot.
02:56 So what does the future hold for these 36 Corvettes?
03:00 We're being approached by people from all over the world who are interested in potentially
03:03 buying it or have other creative ideas for the collection so our original plan was to
03:08 take all of them, get them into working condition and then go to the big auction houses but
03:13 right now we're pretty much keeping our options open.
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