Our 1953-2003 Commemorative Edition Corvette Story

    Chaz & Gael Cone, Atlanta, GA

First Annual Georgia Tech Auto Show

Saturday, March 27, 2004

I graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961 and have been a steady, if modest, contributor to the alumni association ever since.

So how come no one told me about this car show?  Friend Rich Wolf heard about it and emailed me a heads up on the Wednesday before.  He sent me the URL so I clicked on it and found that exhibitors were limited to Tech Students, Staff and Alumni. Had to go!

The show had what seemed to me to be an odd set of categories:

The participants were cut off at 200 cars (they didn't get that many, perhaps because of lack of publicity).

In perusing the list it seemed that the CE fit into the "RWD/4WD Modified" group.

Got there about 8:30a and was placed next to a dune buggy.  Shortly thereafter a really cherry Nassau Blue C5 hardtop parked next to me.

Friends Rich, Bill Donovan and Winston Whitlock came by to offer support and to look at some very interesting cars:

Some in the racing group:

There were all kinds of cars there:

..and at least a couple of pretty rare ones:

In addition to the competing cars there were some pretty nifty cars shown by GM, Ford and others. This is the new Chevrolet SSR retro/pickup truck/sports/retractable hardtop convertible: The little car that doesn't know what it wants to be (except it wants to be sold for $45K MSRP):

And, yes, the top does retract:

The judging was "people's choice" and I usually do pretty well in this kind of event.  At 3:00pm we were ushered into an auditorium for a presentation and the awards ceremony. The presenter was a Tech alumnus who was a principal designer for the Mazda Miata; he made a nice presentation though the sound system in the room wasn't working and it was hard for (us old) folks to hear.

The CE was awarded first place in our class; the trophy is awesome! So very "Georgia Tech-y":


(I look pretty glum for a winner, don't I?)

My thanks to Rich and Winston who took nearly all of these pictures

A good time was certainly had by all -- we'll be back next year!

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