You could be forgiven if you thought a Super Bowl game was being played at the Nashville Coliseum on Friday, June 27th or Saturday the 28th, at least if you came to that conclusion by looking from a distance at the overflowing parking lots. But nearly every car in the vast lots was a Corvette. Roughly 10,000 Corvettes and over 18,000 of the fiberglass fixated poured into the Coliseum for Chevrolet's official two-day Corvette 50th Anniversary Celebration.
It was the finale of a year of celebrations honoring the 50th birthday of America's sports car: A year that began with the National Corvette Museum's Historic Motorama, that featured countless regional and local fetes throughout the year; the most massive Corvette Caravan yet (see Cruzin' To The 50th Anniversary...Caravan Style starting on page 24); and would wrap up on June 30th, the actual date of the Corvette's 50th Anniversary.
Chevrolet picked Nashville, rather than Bowling Green (the "home" of the Corvette since 1981) as the celebration's site because Bowling Green does not have a facility large enough to host an event of the scale that GM planned, nor is there anything approaching an adequate amount of lodging and restaurants in B.G. and the surrounding area. And, Nashville is less than 65 miles south of Bowling Green.
The Official Corvette 50th Anniversary Celebration included enough activities and displays to keep a person busy for several days. Among them were the Corvette Heritage Tour; Chevrolet's SS Vehicle Showcase, Rock and Roll Tour, and Racing Tour; GM Performance Parts and Accessories Tours; and the Chevrolet Powertrain: An Engineering Experience. The National Corvette Museum organized a superb exhibit of Corvettes of every year through 2003. Both the National Corvette Restorers Society and the National Council of Corvette Clubs had shows (judged for the NCRS and Peoples Choice for the NCCC), and the NCRS also conducted a series of extremely popular restoration clinics both days.
Additionally, there were numerous presentations and seminars about Corvettes past and present (plus a few hints about the future) by Corvette engineers, design staffers, and marketing types. There was also a merchandise village, with event souvenirs and some truly unique and cool new Corvette-related products; live music all day both Friday and Saturday; and for the smaller Corvette lovers, electric-powered, pedal-car-size Anniversary Edition C5 convertibles that youngsters could drive on in a closed course.
Friday's festivities concluded with a Corvette parade through part of downtown Nashville, featuring all of the cars from the NCM's 50 Years of Corvette display, plus marching bands and other diversions. Quite a few Corvette celebrities and notables were passengers in the parade Corvettes, including retired Chief Engineer Dave McLellan and current engineering honcho Dave Hill, C5 designer John Cafaro, Chevrolet Division General Manager Brent Dewar (in the lead '53 roadster), Bowling Green Plant Manager Wil Cooksey, and C5-R driver Andy Pilgrim. The mood at-and in-the parade was light and celebratory rather than respectful and sedate. The evening air crackled with the music of big-blocks throwing revs out the side pipes, and several drivers smoked their tires-repeatedly. You knew it was party time in Nashville when the driver of a Z06 smoked 'em big-time right in front of a Nashville motorcycle cop-and the cop grinned and gave the miscreant a thumbs up.
Saturday was more of the same, and that wasn't bad! Things wound down by 6:00 p.m., only to open up a couple hours later for a final 50th-anniversary blowout-closing ceremonies followed by a performance inside the Coliseum by "That Little Ol' Band From Texas," better known as ZZ Top.