Follow Along as I Campaign a 1972 Corvette Convertible

It’s been a crazy busy summer here at CorvetteBlogger’s Motor City Bureau. In addition to my usual participation and coverage of the major Corvette shows, summertime with my 2 Corvette mini copilots, and yet another knee surgery including 6 weeks off my feet, I’ve also been campaigning a 1972 convertible through the National Corvette Restorers Society (NCRS) and Bloomington Gold judging systems. Over the next several weeks I’ll be recanting those experiences up to and through the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals next month.

This adventure begins way back at the 2016 Corvettes at Carlisle show when I promptly ended up selling my 1972 LT-1 while it was displayed in the NCRS Gallery there. After that, the hunt was on for the next one! Later in 2016 I even polled the CorvetteBlogger readers as to what my next Corvette should be. A 1971 or 1972 LT-1 convertible won the vote and was indeed my main target. I looked at several nice cars, but in the end, I couldn’t find one complaint with my checkbook.

Flash forward to the 2017 Corvettes at Carlisle show when I stumbled across a Targa Blue on black 1972 L48 convertible sitting rather nondescriptly in the for sale corral. After speaking with the seller off and on throughout the weekend I elected to not make an offer on the car. As luck would have it, the car was from Grand Rapids just a couple hours from our metro Detroit regional office. While we didn’t get the deal done in August at Carlisle I did end up bringing the car home in early October of last year.

So what’d I get? I am now the 5th owner of a wonderful late-production 1972 convertible. It’s a base motor L48 convertible with the M20 4-speed and 3.36 rear end. Options include the tilt and telescopic steering wheel, AM/FM stereo radio, power brakes, and a vinyl hardtop. It’s not the most desirable old Corvette out there and it’s not as sexy as an LT-1 or 454, but here’s the fun part – it’s unrestored and has just under 31,000 original miles on it. To this day it still sports most all the original paint, interior, engine and chassis components. It’s got a stack of documentation from new including the original registration application, the vehicle shipper, tank sticker and loads of other miscellaneous papers.

Now I wasn’t really looking for a car to have judged this time around, however sometimes you just have to answer the door when opportunity knocks. Cars like this just don’t pop up very often. Given the fantastic unrestored, original condition of this car it just made sense to go at it one more time. So, with the car home, it was time to start going over things in more detail and then come up with a plan for showing the car at some upcoming events. Step 1 was to order up a copy of the freshly revised NCRS Judging Guide for 1970 – 1972 Corvettes.

Next up I’ll walk through some of my findings from the NCRS Judging Guide and how to prep a car for the scrutiny of the NCRS, Bloomington, and MCACN judges. After that, we’ll look at the individual shows and how I fared at each one. See you next week!

Source:
Photos by Steve Burns

Related:
[PICS] The 2018 Bloomington Gold Corvette Show
[PICS] The NCRS Motor City Regional
[PICS] The 2017 Corvettes at Carlisle Show