Motion or no Motion - That is the question

[JoeC]

This Corvette was for sale at the Englishtown swap meet this weekend. It appears to be an original big block AC PB PS 4sp rear sway bar car. The owner said it was a possible Motion Baldwin Corvette but he didn't have any paper on it. The fiberglass parts looked like Motion items but I couldn't find any other signs of it being a Phase III or Phase III GT. While I was hanging around looking the car over, I had fun listening to all the people who had some type of story about Motion Performance or Joel. "Mr. Motion" was well known in the area dragstrips. Two 69 Yenko Camaro clones showed up on Sunday. One HO white stripe the other was LB white stripe car that was for sale for 45K.

[whitetop]

I have seen many Corvette street machines featured in the old New York based publications that had these particular fiberglass mods but were not Motion cars. There were quite a bit of aftermarket manufactures selling the type of pieces Joel was using back then. Custom Enterprises, Eckler Corvette etc. (among many others) all had the same pieces. Today, there are probably 6-8 or more companies making the late model Camaro SS hoods. Many of them look identical--- I talked with the owner of Anderson Fiberglass Industries many years ago about his fiberglass products. He said it was very common back in the '60's & '70's for some slick manufacturers, instead of developing a new piece, to buy a current finished piece from another manufacturer and make the mold from that piece. Saved a lot of development time.
whitetop

[Edited by whitetop (05-01-2001 at 11:10 AM).]

[DarrylD]

Another point is that, in the begining, Joel sold all these parts individually. It was only later that he stopped this practice and started only selling the body parts to verified owner's of Motion cars for the purpose of repairing or restoring a documented car. Still interesting and wondering it it's a real one Joe. What was the asking price?

[Jeff H]

Hey JoeC, were you there on Saturday? I had my 93 Indy Pace Car entered in the show. Man there were a lot of people there. I saw the Blue Yenko clone. I can't believe he was asking $45K because nothing looked overly special about the car and it even had Cragars I think. It was a nice looking car, but you can't just dress a car up and think it's worth anything close to the real thing.

[JoeC]

DarryID - He was looking for best offer on the Corvette and at the time the highest offer was $7500.00. The was no engine and the interior was mostly gone.

Jeff H - I was there on FRI and Sunday. There was a large crowd on Sunday also.

[bowtie3168]

Hey Joe and Jeff,
I feel bad that I missed you guys this weekend. Did you hear me reading the show awards?

Andrew

[Edited by bowtie3168 (05-03-2001 at 08:38 AM).]