TELLTALE TAILLIGHTS

Last night I was leaving the Corvette Funfest at Mid America Motorworks after owner Mike Yager treated his customers and clients to an annual rock concert. The show and the concert were both great and it was about 10:30 when I left. The Mid America Motorworks corporate campus was filled with Corvettes of course, and as they left the show you could see hundreds of Corvette taillights in the dark

Now, an "old car" lover like me might have expected to see the round taillights of early Gen I Vettes or the kind-of-vertical "waterfall" taillights of the Gen 2 cars. Or maybe even the multiple round taillights of the "Midyear" models and the Gen 4 "Sharks." But this year the night was illuminated by square taillights with rounded corners as used on the later years of Corvette production. Basically, there were no -- or very few -- really "old" Corvettes to be seen.

These taillights in the night were a telltale sign of the old-car hobby's never-ending march towards the collecting of newer and newer models. By coincidence, earlier in the day I had interviewed Stacey Heacock of Heacock Classic Insurance. To my surprise, Stacey said that her company will provide collector insurance to almost any year car, as long as there's something special about it and as long as it is driven and maintained as a collector car. Some collectors of late-model cars might want to check this out at www.heacockclassic.com.