Along time ago, in the historic car town of Flint, Michigan, a local teen who’d been exposed to quarter-mile competition spotted this 1959 Chevrolet Corvette convertible parked in a local doctor’s driveway. He was determined to go drag racing with it.
Against all odds, the doctor agreed to sell the stock Corvette, one of 9,670 produced in 1959, to the kid who’d pedaled past his house. That kid was Mike Messner. Beginning in 1963, Mike built it up into a snarling beast and raced it in both sanctioned events and later, on the street, still wearing its competition livery. Once he moved to Arizona in the early 1980s, the Corvette was covered up and stuck in the corner of a Quonset hut on Messner’s rural property. The building quickly became jammed with drag parts and other collectibles.
