5 minute read
Corvette Care
Words by Taylor Dorrell / Photography by Jen Brown / Layout by Bryce Patterson
When I think of Corvettes, I think of the late Joan Didion. Those black and white Julian Wasser portraits of the California writer with her “Daytona yellow” 1969 Stingray and a cigarette. Or that early scene in the commercially unsuccessful movie adaptation of her novel, Play It as It Lays, where the main character Maria files her nails while driving through Los Angeles. They are both, the Corvette and Didion, relics of their time. Relics that require constant attention if they are to weather the stormy winds of history.
There’s been no trouble keeping Didion’s legacy alive, with plentiful reprints and documentaries since her passing in 2021. With a lifetime of works, she has become an integral part of American history and the literary canon. Corvettes, however, face a different struggle. The aging Corvettes of the 20th century require maintenance, upkeep, and restoration. The average techs from modern-day trade schools are exceptionally knowledgeable of the newest cars on dealership lots, with their flashy electronics, gadgets, and computerization. However, ask them to tune a carburetor, deal with a vintage suspension system, or set idle air screws, and they’d likely have just as much knowledge about it as a car-less freelance journalist. “You can take a guy that has every Master tech certification in the world,” says Ryan Srbljan, owner of Corvette Care, “hand them a 1967 Corvette, and it doesn’t make any sense to them.” And so that staple of Americana, the vintage Corvette, appears to be in jeopardy.
The solution is not complex but is instead, if we avoid attempting to expand the requirements of becoming ASE certified, difficult: namely, to find older mechanics with the knowledge that the younger generation lacks. And even more pressingly, to impart that knowledge to that younger generation. The issue is that the old heads are retiring or, to put it bluntly, dying off. Whereas a couple of decades ago, a garage like Corvette Care could find a vintage tech in a few weeks, that search has been lengthened to a year, Srbljan tells me; an issue for Corvette owners who, in the near future, might not have any mechanics who were alive when their cars were manufactured.
But a shop like Corvette Care is finding a way to juggle the difficulties of running a performance and repair shop for Corvettes of all ages. Started in the 1970s; that decade Maria was driving her Stingray through LA, Corvette Care was just a passion project for Lloyd Harvey, who owned a shop on Ferris Road. Harvey passed it to a friend, who passed it off to Srbljan. Srbljan, also known as Frenchy — a nickname that doesn’t reflect his Eastern European roots but instead a misreading of his last name — saw an opportunity to grow the business into what it is today: a 7500-square-foot facility in a more convenient location that still maintains that “corner shop” feel, hosting at any given time a Corvette from 1958 or 2014, performing $300,000 restorations and $200 carburetor fixes, working on a car from Pakistan and one from down the street. The shop is, as Frenchy put it, “full service” when it comes to Corvettes.
Despite the variety of Corvettes between C1 and C8 generations, there are primarily two types of vintage Corvette owners: the cozy retiree who unsuspectingly realizes that their project car is beyond their own individual scope of repair; many of these customers are considered purists, often members of the National Corvette Restoration Society who will find solace in conversing with the techs about old cars, restoration projects, etc. — and then there’s the new wave Corvette owners, a younger, middle-aged generation that inherits a vintage Corvette from their parents and might want it modded to feel more up-to-date — many of these customers don’t mind if the car is gutted and might find solace in avoiding conversing with the techs about old cars, restoration projects, etc. Srbljan says his goal is to continue providing a shop that can cater to both. “You’re either versatile enough to deal with that or you find yourself a dinosaur really quick in this industry,” he told me.
There is something distinctly American about Corvettes, with their striding flash and sleekness. Didion’s 1969 Stingray was a physical manifestation of America’s post-War disillusionment, the car embodying, as the car writer Bob SoroKanich put it, “a curdled ambition, a swoopy, show-car-inspired body plopped on largely unchanged mechanicals.” But when the philosopher Jean Baudrillard visited America in the 1980s, he observed that “the latest fast-food outlet, the most banal suburb, the blandest of giant American cars or the most insignificant cartoon-strip majorette is more at the centre of the world than any of the cultural manifestations of old Europe.” And so, it’s not surprising that Corvette Care is expanding its operation, growing as a business, and projecting an optimistic future. Even with everything happening in the world, the Corvette can still feel like the center of the world. With Columbus’ car-centric urban design, it would be easy to replace Didion’s LA with Central Ohio. Her character Maria, smoothly running her Corvette through I-270, driving just “as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions.”
