When Pete was done working in the world of nitro Funny Cars he came home to help run his father’s machine shop. That transition didn’t stop him from wanting to play around with fast cars on his own time. Pete’s father was still building cars and things came full circle when he stumbled upon some interesting Corvette bodies that would make the great base for a project car.
“My dad had found two of these Corvette bodies in a North Dakota Garage. My father’s not a shy person at all so, he asked around until he found out who owned them and arranged the purchase of the first one. This was in the mid-90s when he purchased the one I have now, then he purchased the second one. The second one was much nicer than the one I have. We had two of them sitting side by side for a long time and I decided I wanted to do something with one of them that was a bit different. Since his first race car was a 1966 Corvette I’ve always liked that body style. He said I could build the worst of the two so that’s what I started with,” Pete explains.
Now, before the Corvette purest in the world have a nuclear meltdown over Pete chopping up an original 1963 model, they need to understand this car didn’t begin life on a GM assembly line. When Pete and his father took a closer look at the bodies they realized something was different. The shells might have looked like they were produced by GM, but when you really pay attention to the details it becomes obvious the bodies were something else.
“I don’t know who actually made the body originally. It’s a fiberglass body but, there’s a lot of steel in these cars. There’s steel around the front windows, rear windows, around the door openings, and it’s called the birdcage. What’s weird about these bodies, they have all the steel in place like an OEM body along with all of the bonding strips that an OEM body would have too. They even have GM part numbers on the fiberglass. We don’t know who built them, where they came from, or anything about them. They don’t have a VIN tag, but it’s really hard to tell it’s not an original body,” Pete says.