on this episode of roadkill it is allabout a wrecking corvettes. that's not gonna buff out. in february of 2014 a giant sinkhole opened up underneaththe national corvette museum in bowling green, kentucky, and its swallowed 8 corvettes there wereworth like jillions of dollars each and that is the most roadkill thingthat ever happened to a buncha museum corvettes. so we figured we needed to check it outwe flew into florida and tried to pick
up the junkiest corvette that we could so thatwe could roadtrip all the way to kentucky and check out that sink hole and have a look at the corvette assemblyline while we were there. my mission was to find freiberger and i transportationfrom florida to kentucky so of course i went right to craigslistand looked for the very worst corvette i could find. jamie hannan owned a '75 corvette that he had bought sixyears ago,
found a buncha rust, and and gave up onthis restoration project and he figured this is the perfect car for roadkill.it's got paint on it. i'd never seen this car before we got there and i'm thinking man this doesn't look that bad but we pulled the plastic off and yeahthis thing was definitely roadkill the interior was completely gone andwhat was there either came out of a jeep or wascompletely rusted into the ground. so what's actually the dilemma here? well there's no windshield so there's one window in the state offlorida
we've called everywhere it's in orlando.it's that hard to find a corvette windshield? wow! oh this is cheating. we can leave now. this is the nicest car with no windshield i've ever driven. so we're checking out the corvette andin walks don schumacher. the don. hi! how you doing? holy crap its don schumacher. if you don't know who don schumacher is
that means you're probably not an nhrafan because this guy has been around since the mid sixties racing stuff likethe stardust funny cars and today he is the single biggest ownerin top fuel teams in the national hot rod association. this guy jamie is schumacher's bestfriend they go fishing together all the time. he mentions that he's going to the lasvegas nhra race the next weekend. i'm heading to vegas on thursday and he invites us to just come by thepits and hangout, park our car in the pits
and everything. we can make this thing go to vegas screw the corvette museum. we qualify friday and saturday eliminations are on sunday you're welcome into the race track justsend me a text i'll arrange for tickets and hospitality and some good meals. we're either going to the corvette museum inkentucky or maybe drag racing in las vegas becausedon schumacher just showed up here. on the floor. ok so we need to get some calipers.
wow that's real bad. oh spinning tires. you should see the steering wheel it goes like this. oh yeah it telescopes. whenyou take off it comes back towards you. as soon as we got on the street i rolleda stop sign because the brakes on the corvette work absolute garbage andimmediately i got pulled over for the second time on roadkill. those stop signs back there you've got to stop ok? this time the cop waspretty cool though he let us go he just
said get this junk off the street and put it right backfrom where you found it and never have it be on a public road again. yeah little did he know. before we go anywhere the corvette doesneed a little bit work it hasn't been on the road in about six years. and it seems like it runs anddrives pretty good we did a test drive out there problem is the brakes are really reallybad. look at all that brake fluid all
over the rotor the great thing about roadkill people ask what the show's about, what do you do? we don't know all of a sudden we show up to do one thing and the plan changes. in this case completely unexpectedly donschumacher shows up and we decide to go to las vegas insteadof bowling green kentucky. we have no idea if we can pull it offwe need to drive something like 2600 miles. 36 hours to get to las vegas here fromflorida in a corvette that hasn't run in six year that needs a brake job
but has no interior in the rain with nowindshield. check it out i found the windshield. oh yeah that'll be perfect. here's the deal our new corvette doesn'thave a windshield and we can't find one within three hoursof where we're at so we're gonna make one from a piece ofacrylic that we got from the hardware store. trace it with a sharpie, cut it out witha jigsaw, tape it in place, and whatever else is leaking we'll cover up with garbage bags and tape
because it's raining, it's probablysnowing, and we need to get this car on the road. custom. fixed. he's gonna put just a couple a texttech screws in the windshield right now to keep it from blowing out of the car while driving. um we change the oil, bleed the brakes, hit the road right? in theory this is so nice now that after we putthe factory trim back over the gorilla
save i'm may go back here and slice the excessoff just because we're that high end at roadkill. alrightnow the big question is how am i gonna mount our tach? when it comes to zip tie craftsmanshipi'm hard to beat pretty much the renowned expert. do you like the tension arrangement here? pretty good yeah and its sturdy. thegeneral consensus here is that we may not make it to vegas
in three days to vegas and we needed some good luck and i spotted this in the rafters here andhow can a bald eagle mounted to, what is that atrophy? now can this not be good luck youcan run for president with this car. alright westbound and down. so after a quick brake job, oil change, no tune up at all, we left jamie behind,jumped in his corvette, and headed for las vegas. i think we're gonna make it.
tach doesn't work actually. that on the floor? yeah. when we hit the road we did the quick math and realized we were gonna have to drive 12 hours just on this day in order to getto vegas on time. so we had no time to spare. that's when theturbo 400 completely gave up ruining all hope ofgetting to vegas in time. how come it's our nicest car and it went the shortest distance? actually our charger didn't go very far eitherbut it was fixable
this isn't fixable. fewest amount of zip ties on this that's the problem. yeah this would be us going on craigslist trying to find another vehicle. or we get a trans. that's a lotta time. even if we finda transmission by the time we change it there's no way we're getting to vegas intime for this race. we're probably going back to plan a and heading up to thecorvette museum but that's only if we could get thisthing fixed. loading it up on the trailer jamie who gave us the car is hunting upa transmission we're going to see if we can get it swapped out tonight.
you ever towed a corvette with the head of a bald eagle on back before? ok we ended up towing the corvette backat jamie's shop where at least he softened the blow with a few beers and he also brought in a bunch offriends to help us and a guy who had found a used turbo 400 transmissionsomewhere in his stockpile and so we jammed on it we got a car up on the lift, did an r&r on the transmission and by thetime we were done it was like midnight. the u-joints on this things are absolutely destroyed. all notchy and loose and junky.
we have the new turbo 400 here butit looks like somebody crammed a metric nut onto the shaft forthe shifter and so we're trying to cut some newthreads on it. so we left with about 12 hours ago, blowup the transmission ten miles down the road, these nice folks found us a used one.got our old converter on here but brand new u-joints. we're about to get back on the road. forwhere i have no idea. we had a running driving vette but stillno hope of making it to las vegas.
the next morning we were stoked again. wewere corvette museum bound in our perfectly good '75 corvette. this car is really not that comfortable. so westopped for some tourist trap action and the thing about florida is thatvirtually every gas station overloads you with gator stuff. a while ago we were at this auto part store and we see this 3rd gen camaro. amazing car, quality paint job said twix on the sidesomething everyone should have, you know. the best part about the car was it had analligator print interior and a real alligator
molded into the top of the dashboard.homeboy's got an alligator on his dash look at it! david fell in love with it and i thinkhe's trying to bite that guy's rhyme because he has bought a gator head andzip tied it to our dashboard. i think we're set friends herethat's what happened. yeah. will we call it the 'boogie nights' corvette or the aarp corvette? i was trying to find you a big gold chain. the great thing about roadkill
is i get to get out to see the countryand some family members. it just so happened that our route tokentucky took us right through georgia where my brother lives. spent nine hourson the road today none of them warm. we're outside georgianow we're in like what atlanta? we're in ackworth, georgia and few episodesago we met finnegan's dad in the middle of nowherewhen we happened to be in arkansas. hey! son of a bitch! this time we're dropping in on hisbrother and his mom. i pretty much won't have to get her a christmas gift after this.
i dressed especially homeless looking for this. we surprised my mom who happen to bevisiting my brother in georgia that night. right now they're going 'mom go answer thedoor she's going it's not my house why do i have to?' oh there she is she's coming. hey mom. no freaking way! oh my gosh. hello sweetie pie. we ended up spending the night at hisbrother's house and having a nice home cooked meal which is rare if not impossible on roadkill andthen the next morning
fired up the corvette and totally broughtdown the property value. i don't think they want that thing infront of their museum that would give corvette's a bad name. good seeing you, dad. drive safe okay? i don't know if you realize the truehistorical significance of this corvette see if you go back to corvette historylook at 1953 and that car had an inline six-cylinderengine making 150 horsepower and twenty-two years later they hadeclipsed that. this corvette with its l48 350 engine makes 165
horsepower that's right this isthe lowest horse powered corvette ever made and they're not even pissed off horsepower they're noteven mildly annoyed horse power. but the good news is the interior issuper comfy with these jeep wrangler seats and no dash to get in the way. yeah thisis about as good as a corvette gets at least a roadkill corvette. thursday morning now on our way to bowlinggreen, kentucky and we're going to see where they actually make corvettes.
we need to give them a few tech tips based on our intimate knowledge of this model. here's where you screwed up the part of the car that allows water to go into the car don't do that anymore. this is the worst corvette ever. it has no horsepower, no windows, it'sreally cold the only thing keeping us from freezing to death are these blankets but other than that things aregoing pretty well. i'm feeling pretty good about thistrip right up until the point where we
ran outta gas. we were shocked to discover that thefuel gauge in the corvette wasn't really accurate. we were able to shag across like four lanesof traffic off an off-ramp barely cresting the topa bit just in time to get another down hill off ramp where we coasted into a gas station. within like 10 be the pump it couldn'thave gone better. once we figured out how to keep gasin the tank it was pretty much smooth sailing til we finally arrived at themecca of corvettes:
bowling green, kentucky which is the siteof not only the national corvette museum but also the assembly plant where everysingle corvette has come from since 1981 and they even had special parking justfor us. finally made it to bowling green we'redeep inside the heart of the corvette plant this is where all thebrand new corvettes come from right here. there's seven milesof conveyor belts that go around inside this building, that's a million square feet that's 14 acres. i was just at disneyland like a week agowith my kid
and it looks a lot like this accept thisis brighter and moving a lot slower but somehow this is more fun than mr. toad's wild ride. this is where the frame is actually builtfrom the ground up the frame is actually aluminum now as opposed to steel that makes it 99 pounds lighter and about 57% stiffer. this is where they all come together the engines being installed up from thebottom actually the bodies being dropped onto the chassis from above. oh look here check it out the headers are on it already
they obviously don't know how to do thisright because there isn't atf all over the floor i don't see anybody looking for tools. ihate to say it but it really makes us look like amateurs. it kinda does. so many people hererecognizing us people who work on the assembly line i think we're gonna beresponsible for ruining a couple corvettes because people are stopping looking to wave at us. dude you're the real thing i can't freaking believe it! oh!
roadkill is awesome i can't begin to tell you. my boys are gonna freak. cool. very nice thanks a lot. look at that hey nobody's driving that. that's our agc robot it's our 'automated got it cart'. it has vision technology so if you were actually standing in front of it it would patiently wait for you to move. after the tour we finally reached the very end the place where the corvette is brought to life for the very first time
and move under their own power and thevery first thing they do after like ten feet is run over these gnarly bumps to settle the suspension form. i'm not really a corvette guy you know they'reexpensive i really can't afford one but i gotta admit i walked outta thisplace wanting one. finally we arrived at our ultimate destination: ground zero forcorvette destruction. this are the ones they pulled out. so thisthing fell into middle earth. it's really not thattrashed. looks most of the stuff in my driveway. ohokay...
oh my god. so harold and karen clark donated their carthe museum and this is how it's treated? yep. i'm not leaving my car here. i'd just put it back into the hole. how do we get to the hole, miss? you'reheading that way just don't go in it. there's a glass wall. that's why we got these. we knew the odds were pretty low that the guys at the corvette museum wouldallow let us ghost ride the stingray in the hole but wethought we try anyway i mean hell we
drove all the way from florida how can they tell us no? we have a car we'd like to donate to the museum. you do? but we want to put it directly in the holeso it can no longer hurt any of mankind. what kind of car is it? a '75 corvette. i thought you would say mustang or something. oh no we want to make atime capsule. we're gonna make a donation no offense nobody wants this corvette i'd actually like to ghost ride it into the hole. you would? yeah break the gas pedal, let it go, where she lays she lays. think like a live video feed. yes that's something i'd like to see.
that would be fun. alright sweet hole bob thanks for showing us. i don't think bob's gonna let me put my stingray into the hole. after a week-long immersion into thecorvette world and seeing the sinkhole that swallowed 8vets we get it now: chevy runs deep. so in the end it turns out we kind ofoffended these guys with the suggestion that our '75 should go back into the hole and get covered up and pavedover as a memento to the corvettes that could havebeen lost. and so here we bring you
gratuitous corvette violence all 165 horsepower worth. (eagle screech!) yeah the beauty of this is we can't open the hood because the cable broke. we're fine. so i finally got the corvettestingray outta my system i'd kinda wanted one for a long time and now i had a road trip in one. if youthink about it this was a roadkill win we took acar that had not run in six years, fixed it, overcame adversity, went to thecorvette assembly plant, saw the sink hold,
and unfortunately did not get to leaveour corvette behind. as usual time was short and we had to jump on an airplane home so we call up our buddies at holly andsaid 'hey man you can have the keys to our corvette'. why we always bailing these guys out? divas. here's you choice you can take it back over there and park it so as not to be on the street alright if i see it again we're going to have to tow it. that's my second choice? that's your second choice. okay well i am picking optionnumber one.
thank you very much for the courtesy.