On my 16th birthday, summer of 77, my parents gave me a key to their original second car that they had purchased in 65. It was a little rough but my parents got it repaired, running and inspected. The rest was on me as they had actually intended to send the car to the junk yard but thought better of it with a 16 year old in the house. It was black and white. I really did not know much about the car except that it ran and That I now had a set of wheels to drive. Learned pretty quickly from my classmates that I had a pretty popular car. So I must Have compounded and waxed that car 30 or 40 times in that first year. It was missing trim, paint was peeling and cracking and failing off but I cleaned it up a bit, took my drivers test in it a couple of weeks later, and drove it.
by summer of 78 I decided to take it Apart and strip down all the paint jobs on the body. Learned pretty quickly from the body shop that I could not afford a black paint job, well one that looked decent anyhow, so I opted to paint it 78 corvette red. It’s still 78 corvette red.
First photo is 16 year old me stripping the paint off the car. Second is after I got done. The third is a few days after I got the car back probably October 78. The last photo is probably late 80s or early 90s at maple grove raceway.