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CORVETTE TODAY #58-Meet The Man Who Created Bloomington Gold Certifications...David Burroughs!
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May 9, 2025
CORVETTE TODAY #58 - Meet the Man Who Created the Bloomington Gold Certifications, David Burroughs! David Burroughs is a soft spoken man. He has accomplished so much in the world of Corvette. He is the person responsible for creating the Bloomington Gold judging and the Gold Certification! Your CORVETTE TODAY host, Steve Garrett, talks to David about how he came about creating this judging standard, the obstacles he overcame and how it became so successful. David is also widely recognized as one of the leaders in automotive authentication in the world. He has branched out to authenticate other things too, which are talked about in this podcast. His company called Prove-It has accomplished just that! He co-authored the book, "Corvette Restoration-State of the Art" and is an accomplished formation pilot as well! It's a fascinating story about Corvettes and judging on this episode of CORVETTE TODAY! Listen Here: https://adori.page.link/corvette-today Website: www.CorvetteTodayPodcast.com Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2718423201763136 CORVETTE TODAY Emails: https://CorvetteToday.ck.page
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0:00
[Music] welcome to corvette today
0:05
the podcast that talks about everything corvette with your host steve garrett mc and dj at one of the largest corvette
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weekends in the country corvette fun fest president of the corvette club of kansas city missouri
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and radio disc jockey at the number one radio station in kansas city for over 40 years here's steve garrett
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[Music] hey thanks for listening to corvette
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today the podcast that talks about everything corvette i'm your host steve garrett i appreciate
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also a shout out to canadiancorvetform.com welcoming corvette owners from around the world my guest on corva today is an
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avid motorsport and aviation enthusiast he's also the founder and retired ceo
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of bloomington gold and he created the gold certification judging procedures he's one of the
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world's experts in determining the metrics used to measure the originality or non-originality as the case may be
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of collectible vehicles and aircraft he co-authored the book called corvette restoration
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state of the art his museum quality restorations have set the bar for today's corvette
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and car restorers around the world he is mr david burroughs david welcome to
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corvette today thank you steve appreciate the invitation i'm glad to have you on david let's talk about your early years
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i always ask everybody this when did you know you were a car guy somewhere probably around five or six somewhere in
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there i asked my dad for a birthday present for my parents but my dad normally for this i wanted
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carburetors and starters i was fascinated with carburetors and starters then i could take them apart
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and so he would get carburetors and starters and other components out of engines and given to me for my birthday they were
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junk then i could take them apart and fiddle with them and put them back together again and then that led to more things than
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automobiles and then go-karts building soap box derby cars and then regular powered go-karts and go-kart
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racing kind of went on from there that's kind of interesting because when most kids that age are looking for
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tonka trucks and hot wheels you're looking for carburetors aren't you yes carburetors and starters now i had
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no idea what they did i knew it was a carburetor but i didn't already know i knew gasoline came out of it
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but i was five or six years old and i lived in a living on a farm i still live there a matter of fact
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so as a farm kid i was around tractors and trucks and engines and noise and smoke and gasoline
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great place to grow up as a kid so i had my fingers in gasoline and dirty parts and oil since i was a little kid
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how did you get first introduced a corvette david this sounds paradoxical but at the chrysler garage my dad was a
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chrysler guy i live in el paso illinois which is a small town that time it was eighteen hundred people but it did have a
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chrysler garage and those wheel garage my dad would go in and spend time with the chrysler guys at the dealership
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and so my introduction to corvette was a horrible automobile you know any chrysler could beat one
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huh so i thought corvettes never paid attention to them i just knew that they weren't as fast as a chrysler and i looked down on them to tell you
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the truth because that's that's all i heard from the chrysler people that my dad was around at the dealership that he bought his
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chrysler's from so that was my introduction to corvette it was not positive well it obviously turned to a more
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positive thing how did that go after that it did it actually did and i can even tell you the date it was in
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august of 1961. i was visiting a friend in north webster indiana
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which is a kind of a tourist town has a lake anyway at night we were walking down the street because we didn't have
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any driver's license because we were too young to drive so we walked everywhere and as a resort town this was perfect setup it was kind of
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like an american graffiti night the street lights lighted of course as the cars went by and a white
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corvette i think a 58 came down the street toward us and then made a right turn into a gas station and
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as it pulled under these lights these beautiful gorgeous lights rippled off the white paint on this corvette
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and i thought now there's a corvette and told my buddy out there there's a corvette there in which we
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would have kept on walking with one exception about six girls came out of nowhere and swarmed around
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this white corvette and all of a sudden corvette went from lowest on the totem pole
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two i gotta get one of those and that was in eighth grade so that's when the tide turned and i
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thought i think i better reconsider my favorite car very smart idea what corvettes have you
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owned in the past david and what is in your garage right now well i've had the fortune of being
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exposed and the fortune of owning several rather historic vehicles that sort of came into
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because i was the right place the right time with the right knowledge at one time owned in partnership with a couple
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other people 367 l88s at the same time wow had 267 l88s parked
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in the garage side by side very nice and other cars like that but owning them wasn't really the objective they just
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happened to be things that i thought i could contribute to and hopefully save them so the only way
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to save them was to buy them and do the proper things with them to make sure that they didn't get destroyed unknowingly by somebody who didn't know
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how to take care of them so there's numerous historic vehicles like that that i've been fortunate to get my hands on and do something to
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contribute to their long-term survivability the only thing i have really today is the first corvette i ever had which is a
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67 so i'm not a collector or i guess i am a collector of one owning one doesn't really mean that much
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to me it's what i can do to preserve one or help somebody else preserve one that is historically important talk about
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that thirst for preserving corvettes and how that led you into forming bloomington gold
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well in 1973 i started showing the corvette that i just told you that i have i took it to several corvette shows at
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that time it was an old car but think about it was 1967 and this is 1973 so it's you know
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six years old which at that point time would be old so the paint was a little bit faded silver but everything else was
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bone stock original and of course there wasn't a chance in the world i'm gonna win anything with a silver
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67 coupe with black wall tires and coffee can hubcaps you can't win anything and i thought
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well gee going to these car shows back in the early 70s there were no standards there were
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judges that really didn't know what they were doing other than making sure that there was no dirt in the fender wells and the paint
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was pretty and nice design the thing that really caught my attention was there was one winner usually and
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everybody else was a loser as a marketing guy i thought that doesn't look like a sustainable concept
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so i thought the car that's original has been left alone but it doesn't have a chance unless somebody made it into a station wagon or
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put stars and stripes on it or glittery wheels or something like that i thought why don't i do something for cars that
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have not been altered or changed and so forth then rather than having one winner and everybody else losing i thought what if
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we set standards like high jumping and so if you can jump over the high bar at seven feet we'll certify you you can jump
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seven feet and if you jump six five guess what you don't get certified so it's not like everybody gets a
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participant award but if you set the standards high and don't negotiate that's what it is if
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you can't clear the bar this year go practice some more and come back because the bar is not going to change right if you get better you jump over
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the bar so i thought that concept makes sense and there was a lot of cars out there that had not been restored and had not
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been modified and had not been customized and made to look glittery i thought well that's a pretty big
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market that's a bigger market than the cars that have been changed so i've came up with this idea to certify automobiles
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the way they would have left the factory and everybody thought that was the dumbest idea they'd ever heard of because i asked a lot of people what if
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i created an event that recognized cars that had been left alone in the original condition and people would say
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well why in the world would you do that and i explained it i said well that could be a car out in the parking lot
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i said yeah that's exactly the idea and they said that's a dumb idea so anyway i did it anyway had 127
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automobiles show up at the first event of which half of them were furious when they left
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because they'd never heard of such a concept they didn't know that's what they were getting into attendance at the first bloomington gold
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was i think 127 vehicles and the next one was 80. so i made a pretty big impression that
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this is not where you want to go if you've got a quote show car i remember a number of people telling me
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this is ridiculous everywhere i go i win the best of show and i didn't even get a certificate here and i said right yeah that's right and
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i'm never coming back and i said that makes good sense because you won't do any better next year either
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and then gradually people started saying well i got a bloomington gold certificate
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basically people referred to it as bloomington and they got a gold certificate so then that ads would start showing up in magazines that they got
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this xyz corvette for sale with a bloomington gold certificate i never did any real serious advertising
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all the owners advertised for me by promoting their vehicles with a bloomington gold certificate and then went from there well and we're
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going to talk in the second segment a little bit more and dig deeper into your bloomington gold years but
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david you've also written books on corvette restoration talk about that book and where people can purchase it well i didn't write it
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i contributed to mike antonic who's a very good friend and just a super
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research guy mike wrote secrets of the show cars he writes the corvette black book which has been in existence 78 or
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something like that right the book was actually written somewhere i think around 1980 i think it
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came out in 81 so mike is the actual author i gave him the content we've done it for
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multiple multiple times and i took it all the photography and the books corvette restoration state of the art as you mentioned and it was the
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documentation of the first corvette ever to have been done to my knowledge not just the first corvette but i think
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the first automobile on which a book was written about how to document what a vehicle looks like and
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then to be able to restore it to exact factory look which included scratches
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scuff marks blemishes that are all factory produced that are documented both through photography of the vehicle
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before it was taken apart and also i've got quite a background at the corvette plant in st louis where i knew
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how the product was built and was there and studied it recorded so the book was sort of a groundbreaker to show people
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how it could really be done if you really want to do an accurate or authentic restoration to factory production very
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nice it was so long ago it's almost 40 years ago that we wrote that of course it's like i think long
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out of print but you can still get it on google i think you can still look for it probably 50 60 bucks 70 bucks you can
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probably buy a copy great and you're also an accomplished pilot talk about how that got started when you soloed
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when you got licensed and when you even became an instructor well i got interested in airplanes
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before automobiles i think i started with automobiles maybe at five or six started with airplanes when i was
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probably one or two so the time i was six i'd built a hundred flying airplanes model airplanes i never remember
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lifetime without being fascinated and involved with airplanes of some sort being grown up on a farm it was kind of
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a remote thing because there's no airplanes around here but i had great space to build airplanes and fly them rubber band
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powered and engine powered and so forth i just progressed and i knew i wanted to be a pilot when i was
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four five six years old i wanted to be an indie race driver and or a pilot and was able to get quite
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a bit of that done i wanted to be an astronaut to begin with but eyes weren't good enough so i didn't make it all that way but
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started flying took the controls for the first time at nine and soloed at 16 a commercial pilot at
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18 instructor 21 and corporate pilot by 23. that's it absolutely incredible david
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let's take our first break and in segment number two we're going to talk about your years and how you started bloomington gold on
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this is the corvette today podcast with steve garrett
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thanks for listening to corvette today the podcast that talks about everything corvette i'm your host steve
15:26
garrett with me today is david burroughs the original owner and founder of bloomington gold as a matter of fact in
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the second segment we're going to talk about david's bloomington gold years david we touched on this in the first
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segment and i really like the way you made the concept of bloomington gold where you're not judging against
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somebody else's car you're judging against a set of standards talk about those standards
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and the level of certification of different things that you can win for bloomington gold okay well to begin with the standards are
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based as we said earlier on the vehicle has it left the assembly plan
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and that's reasonably documentable because there were plenty of vehicles around that we've got photographs of
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brand new understanding the plant so first off you can't really have an award for something unless you have standards
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that are documented so the standards came from how close is the restoration
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or the preservation of one of these vehicles that you bring to bloomington gold how close is it to the way it left the
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assembly plant in terms of the configuration the originality the condition
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and also the technical operation and kind of back to grade school days and report cards which is where i took the
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concept i thought anything that would be within 95 percent or greater would be a gold level
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certification so that would be gold certified if it was preserved or restored to between
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90 and 94 of factory authenticity then that would be a silver level of
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certification and anything between 85 and 89 which would be equivalent to a c
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according to the way i got my grades in grade school that would be a bronze certification so if you came
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there the first year and you got everything pretty close but not quite and you got 93 which is really good you would be
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sober certified and you could quit or you could come back make some the corrections
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which we would hopefully point out to you what you could do to bring it up so it was about educating as
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much as winning a prize the whole objective was to preserve these vehicles or at least restore them
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accurately so we don't lose them to history and then you could come back the next year you made your improvements hopefully and
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then guess what you've got a 96 percent it's gold certified and then of course some people say well i want to go
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further than that i want to get 100 well come back as often as you want you can go as high as you like but no matter what you do you're not
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going to get anything higher than a gold certificate period that's it so it did away with the
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i'm better than you are you're all good so if you all can jump the seven foot high bar well you'll get a certificate
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if you jump the five foot bar you're going to get a sober certificate and so on so that really wasn't that complicated
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for people to figure out and it caught on it became something more important than winning a prize the important thing was
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that you got to learn some things from people who really didn't know what they were talking about because the other secret to this is you
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have to have people out there who doing the judging they have to have standards against which the judge which before this
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nobody had any standards everybody just made it up as they went along so we had judges that were trained properly had to have people skills
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and then the owners could come there enjoy themselves not worry about beating the next person
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all they had to worry about was can you get within a very very close tolerance of what it looked like or left the factory
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if you had a custom car by definition we're not going to do that because that's antithetical to what the
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whole point of limington gold was so we did it for the first two years we had custom cars in there
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in my opinion it diluted the whole point and confused people about what we really stood for
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so that didn't last very long i think now bloomington gold is doing that again i don't know what results they've had i
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assume it must have been okay but at that point in time the categories or the levels of certification were gold
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silver and bronze and the primary objective was be a place where people could come and
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learn and not just get a hundred points but get a 100 point vehicle and we tried to draw the
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distinction between this award isn't about you the owner it's about the authenticity of what you brought here
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very nice bloomington gold became the standard for the corvette industry you created that standard talk about
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what sets bloomington gold apart from other shows or other concourse this is my personal opinion this is me
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speaking nobody else i don't like car shows i don't find them necessarily productive i find them
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entertaining but i don't find them productive and i oftentimes don't find any real great amount of learning that goes on
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it's more entertainment which is fine i just wasn't interested in entertainment i was interested in helping people
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learn if they wanted to they could learn how to preserve things or at least restore things accurately that's all it was designed
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for and people determined whether they liked that idea or not and if you didn't like it there's plenty of other car
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shows you can go to and that's where you should go so it's kind of like you know anything in marketing you have to stand for
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something as long as you can appeal to a market that's good enough to support the operation and make a profit on top
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of it that's what you do and that's another thing to mention bloomington gold was never a club it was a business it had to be a
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business because we had a lot of expenses we paid the judges expenses we paid for uniforms we paid for a lot of things
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rental of the properties so it was a true business it was not political there was a board of directors but they weren't elected
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it was pretty much dictatorial i found the people that were competent as financial people or as operations
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people or tech people whatever we needed and paid them paid them well so it's not a membership organization
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it was a true business created to teach people and give people an incentive to come there and hopefully everybody would have a
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good time and enjoy it and get an education out of it we added other events around it to make it more
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entertaining as well you also sold bloomington gold at some point david talk about your exit what
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came next and who did you sell it to there were some other people in the organization i came into it in 78
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it was a swap meet and had some judging but the judging was very disorganized and a lot of politics and i
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don't like politics i don't like disorganization so i made a suggestion to the people there then that they got
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this idea called certification they thought that was okay that's where it was introduced was in 78 but it
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wasn't called bloomington gold it was just called gold certification the marketplace called it bloomington gold they got a bloomington gold
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certificate so then i branded it the actual show then bloomington gold anyway that was in 78 that it started
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gold certifications in 78 and 83 was rebranded bloomington gold where a lot of other events came in to
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play special collection road tours restoration workshops all kinds of other ancillary events for
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entertainment and education and then in 1994 some of the other
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people that were involved with it with me thought that they could run it better than i could so they decided to buy me
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out i gladly took their check well i never left i'm professional market research guy with a big company
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and got out of it at that time and i was gone for 10 years dana mecum bought it in 1997 i believe
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and then he asked me to come back and run certification because he was busy with the auction and then a little later he
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asked me to come back and actually run bloomington gold and so i was gone for 10 years came back for 10 years
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and then guy larson bought it from dana so i wasn't needed there anymore for that so guy bought the brand
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bought the show and then he's the owner and ceo so then i left that i was retired at that point from my
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professional career and at that point i branched into other ventures in authentication and we're going to talk about that in
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segment three actually we've had guy larson on the podcast he was the first podcast in 2021
23:01
but let you and i take our final break david and in segment number three we're going to talk about your current company
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and now back to corvette today with your host and my husband steve garrett
25:29
[Music] hey thanks for listening to corvette today the podcast that talks about everything corvette
25:35
i'm your host steve garrett with me today is the original founder of bloomington gold
25:40
mr david burroughs in this third segment we're going to talk about david's current company called pruvit david your passion for
25:47
originality brought you to start this company call prove it talk about the beginnings of it
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and what the mission of your company is now well i was asked to inspect a race car
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as a matter of fact and it was a corvette and it was purported to be a bonneville race car that was owned by
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mickey thompson wow and it had been restored nice restoration it was quite authentic to the bonneville
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delivery it looked just like it did at the track not really a track but it had the salt plants and there would be some
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significance to it since it was owned by mickey thompson and it had been sold i think a couple times and before it was sold
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this time i was asked to authenticate it to make sure that it really was what it was claimed to be so i did and
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found out kind of good news and bad news that no it is not what it's claimed to be it never was
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nikki thompson's bonneville race car which it had been i guess around the show circuit for 20 years or so and that's what it was
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considered and then i'm the person that has to bring the news that no it isn't there was forensic evidence and
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a lot of circumstantial stuff the main thing was there was physical forensic evidence that showed clearly that is not what it's purported
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to be because we had documentary photographic evidence from 1963 and 64. when the car did
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run bonneville this did not match that vehicle so that's the bad news the good news was we've determined that
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mickey thompson had far more seat time in this vehicle than the bonneville vehicle oh so yes it was mickey
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thompson's personal car mickey thompson had more to do with this car than he did the bonneville card
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so that was the bad news that turned into good news sometimes that does happen we find out that it's not what it was
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purported to be but it is something that kind of got off track in somebody's enthusiasm to maybe make the story
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better but they had been better off if they left the story alone in the first place and so we were able to get that car
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straightened out and it has since then gone into i think numerous collections with its real history and important
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history revealed and straightened down so from that other people heard about that and then i got asked to do other authentications
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and that's where the name prove it came from people would want me to come in and prove whatever it was they wanted to prove
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so i branded it prove it since then that was in 2012 so been doing this almost 10
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years i guess but it has gone from corvettes into vehicles in general to airplanes to
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iconic movie artifacts to historic artifacts pruvit actually does and can do
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authentications pretty much on anything it's the process that's important not the object we're doing a document that
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was i can't tell you i could but i'm not allowed to it's a document that went to the moon
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and circled the moon about 100 times and came back i can't tell you who took it but that project is just getting ready to get
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started to be able to authenticate that that is documented circle the moon 100 times that's amazing
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yeah it's interesting it's an interesting business did a movie jacket that james dean supposedly wore in rebel without a cause
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did that doing an airplane that was flying during the attack on pearl harbor wow it's gone from everything from
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bonneville race cars to objects that circle the moon with your background as a pilot and an
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aviation mechanic prove it also works obviously in the automotive and corvette industry but
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aviation as well that's really a rare combination david it's beyond that we do stuff that's
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beyond aviation you know in the movie business as well james dean's jacket had nothing to do with automobiles or aviation
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it's the process we go through to authenticate something forensically testimony records all sorts of things
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you have to go through and every project is totally different the thing that's unique about pruvit is is the process we use
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and how we do it and then who makes the decision whether it's authentic or not authentic or how confident we are because i'm not the
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person that makes the decision anybody who has something authenticated by prove it the interesting thing is
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nobody can pay anybody off because if you were the client you wouldn't know who to pay off to make it come out your
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way we come in we do the research you give us your information and then we look for somebody who
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disagrees with you and has the other point of view and we get research from them and we go through we actually build two
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cases we build one for you we build one against you and then you get to look at all that evidence and correct it if we said it
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wrong and then the counterparty can look through their evidence and then that evidence goes through a review and then eventually goes out to a jury
30:07
of critical thinkers like test pilots surgeons attorneys anybody who has as a profession something is looking
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at evidence and making a conclusion when the evidence goes out to that panel or that jury of five the jury doesn't know who the other four
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people are and you the client don't know who the jury is so you can't pay me off because
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i don't make the decision i just gather the evidence and we present the evidence on both sides of the argument
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so you can't pay me off because i don't do anything other than organize the research and coordinate it you can't pay the
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witnesses off because there's too many of them you can't pay the jury off because you don't
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know who they are and the jury can't get together and collude against you because the jury doesn't know who the other four
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analysts are so it's the only i've been told anyway that this is the only authentication service that's that
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rigorous so when you get an authentication promise why you can pretty well take it to the bank very unique you're also david a
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four-time national aerobatic champion and an eight-time national formation champion
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talk about those two titles that's really cool not much to talk about i fly airplanes
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upside down right side up straight up straight down do it a little bit more precisely than whoever i was
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competing against those four times formation flying is quite different that's kind of like what the thunderbirds and the blue angels do
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except we're not nearly that fast we fly much slower world war ii airplanes i wouldn't call it a hobby
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it's just a very interesting lifestyle to fly with people like that that are that well trained and you have the trust to fly with those
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kinds of people so it's very rewarding to be around those kinds of people very unique too you also set restoration
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standards because of your ties to the smithsonian national air and space museum talk about how those standards helped
31:47
you with corvette and aircraft as well precision documentation that's critical whether it's improvement or anything
31:53
else we look at things in a very very different way than car show judges do
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or beauty queen judges things like that this is a whole different mindset of which drives probably most people
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crazy and they would think that's ridiculous and it is ridiculous unless you've got something that has high value to it it's
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very important i'm not tied to the smithsonian in any professional way i just happen to again have the good fortune of knowing people
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at the smithsonian and have had for about 20 years so i've gone out studied their processes how
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they do things when they do a restoration for example i do the same thing i learned it from their procedures
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as they take a nut bolt and washer out or off of something that nut bolt and washer is never
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separated and it's documented as to which hole it came out of left rear right rear top bottom wherever that's all
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documented it goes into the plastic bag and if that gets replated it's all remembered
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photographed and then when it comes back and goes back on the artifact that bolt washer and nut go back in
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the same hole in the same order to the same number of turns on the bolt so that's ridiculously precise and
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totally useless to most people and it would drive most sane people
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insane but when you're in the business of trying to document some high risk and high value artifact whether it's an
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airplane race car lunar lander or whatever it happens to be it's important to do that because
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that does show provenance it shows documentation that this is the real artifact this has
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not been replaced with other hardware bolts this is the bolt that came out of that race car that raced at le mans or
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race at indianapolis driven by mario andretti this is the same seat this is the same
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stitching in the seat that john kennedy was in etc etc so those kinds of things are appropriate for the smithsonian for the
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regular garden variety restorer that would be ridiculous and terribly expensive and unnecessary
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but that's the mentality when you're in the kind of business that i'm in now we have to look at things very carefully because that
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can turn a case from an original artifact to a fabrication that it's authentic
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fabrication but it's a fabrication nonetheless and that is not the part that was on the indy 500 car that andretti drove
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that's the tie-in to smithsonian david if somebody wants to get in touch with you at pruvit how can they reach you best
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way is email or website website is p-r-o-v-e hyphen it.net pruvit.net with hyphen
34:18
between proven hit that sounds good david thank you so much for being on corvette today the stories
34:24
were just amazing and best of luck with prove it thank you steve it's a pleasure thanks for listening to
34:29
corvette today and thanks to our sponsors american hydrocarbon at american americanhydrocarbon.com
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and kc trends motorsports at caseytrends.com and don't forget e-tec custom coatings
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at etekcustomcodings.com or call 913-745-3732
34:49
you've been listening to corvette today with steve garrett if you'd like to contact steve with any
34:54
thoughts on the podcast or ideas for guests on corvette today you can email him at steve garrett dj
35:01
gmail.com that's steve garrett dj gmail.com
35:07
garrett has two r's and two t's or connect with steve on social media on facebook twitter or instagram using
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at steve garrett dj thanks again for listening to corvette
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