About the Queen City Chapter of the NCRS

Welcome to the Queen City NCRS serving the Cincinnati and surrounding Tri-State Area

Several Corvette fans gathered to celebrate the significance of Americas finest sports car, in doing so they started the Queen City NCRS Chapter. Many years later we have developed into a tight knit group of friends, growing and learning all the way. We look forward to our monthly meetings. Prospective members are welcomed and encouraged to attend. See the Calendar for date and location.

With a variety of members any Corvette related answer is only a phone call away. We take part in road trips, picnics, technical seminars; not to mention our annual swap and chapter meets. Along with group trips to NCRS Regional and National activities there is always fun to be found within our great chapter. Look through our website, and mark our next meeting on your calendar we are looking forward to meeting you.

Tom James Queen City Chapter NCRS Chairman

High Achievers Set The Pace for the 2024 Winners of the Old Cars Magazine Golden Quill Award

Each year the winners are carefully selected to meet the needs and preferences of club members while maintaining a high integrity in content, creativity, information, accuracy, design, variety, technical ideas, and overall feel. Awards are given out in both National and Regional division for Compact, Intermediate, and Full-Size print publications based on page count and page size of the magazines and newsletters. Chief judge in the selection is Dr. Gerald Perschbacher, distinguished longtime writer for Old Cars. Winners for 2024 include numerous NCRS Chapter newsletters as well as the NCRS’s The Corvette Restorer. Here is the list:

National Full-Size:
- The Corvette Restorer, Vinnie Peters, editor, NCRS
Full-Size Regions & Chapters:
- The Vette Signal--Michigan NCRS chapter
- Crossed Flags–North Central chapter NCRS
- The Legend–St. Louis chapter NCRS
- R.P.M.–Pittsburgh Tri-State chapter NCRS
- The Fuel Line–Florida chapter NCRS
Intermediate Size Regions & Chapters
- High Plains Shifter--Rocky Mountain chapter NCRS

Pace Cars highlight Barrett-Jackson AZ sale:

Of 2,001 lots , all selling at no reserve, a group of 10 Indianapolis Pace cars sold by GM Heritage collection was one of the higher-profiling collections offered. Dating from 1982 through 2019, these cars were deemed excessive by GM Heritage, as most were back-ups to the actual pace cars. While some were one-off prototypes and others were modified for track duty, all of these cars were sold with “scrap” titles for non-highway use.

1997 Oldsmobile Aurora Indy Pace Car: Condition #3 sold for $30,000
1983 Buick Riviera Indy Pace Car: Condition #3 sold for $47,000
1989 Pontiac Trans Am 20th Anniversary: Condition #2 sold for $50,000
(2) 1995 Chevrolet Corvette Indy Pace Cars: Condition #2 (one sold for $50,000 and the other for $42,000)
2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS Indy Pace Car: Condition #2 sold for $50,000
2011 Chevrolet Camaro SS Indy Pace Car: Condition#2 sold for $70,000
2019 Corvette Grand Sport Indy Pace Car: Condition #2 sold for $50,000
2012 Corvette ZR1 Indy Pace Car: Condition #2 sold for $110,000

March 2025 Meeting– Jaguar Cincinnati

Car of the month- 2007 Corvette Z51 Indy 500 Pace Car owned by Steve H

Steve and Kathy took this vehicle on the Tail of the Dragon in March 2025

Tail of the Dragon March 2025

Unfortunately one owner’s car did not survive the Tail of the Dragon

2025 Swap Meet at Kelsey’s Chevrolet

Is it a Cord? Is it a Corvette? Or is Marty Martino’s latest creation, the CordVette, the best of both cars?

0:43 / 10:11

For a vehicle that only lasted a couple years on the market, Gordon Buehrig’s Cord 810 and 812 have sure had an outsize influence on car designers and enthusiasts ever since. David North, Stan Wilen, and Bill Mitchell packed the Oldsmobile Toronado with all sorts of design elements paying homage to the Toronado’s front-wheel-drive predecessor. Multiple customizers through the Fifties tried their hand at making a sports car out of the coffin-nose Cord. And on at least three occasions, entrepreneurs have resurrected or attempted to resurrect the Cord. So Marty Martino’s really just following in a grand tradition by building a modern Cord out of the bones of a fifth-generation Corvette.

“I never thought of this project as a ‘sport custom’ in the traditional way, but being that it’s a one-off Cord-inspired design, I now see it as a continuation of the genre,” Marty said after reading our recent story on Fifties-era sport-custom Cords.

The roots of the project date back to the late Eighties, when Automobile Quarterly ran a design contest asking for its readers to envision the Cord 810, Tucker 48, or Packard Caribbean as they would have appeared in 1990. “What really made the contest exciting to me was that it was to be judged by Alex Tremulis, Frank Hershey, Dick Teague, Bill Mitchell, Chuck Jordan, Jack Telnack, and Dave Holls, many of my automotive heroes!” Marty said.

Marty’s updated Cord 810/812 rendering.

Marty selected the 810, and while the phone-dial wheels, wraparound indent, and jellybean taillamps all reflect the era in which he re-envisioned the Cord, the coupe managed to blend the original’s subtly stepped fastback, haunches, hidden headlamps in winglike fenders, and speed line grille in with contemporary shape and proportions. The entry made it into print as one of four runner-up designs that the judges chose. Not bad, Marty thought, considering “most of the entrants were accomplished illustrator/designers, students at Art Center, and so on,” he said.

The rendering got filed away until about a decade ago, when Marty’s younger brother, Robert, expressed an interest in building a modern Cord using a Corvette as the donor car. Robert, according to Marty, “had long held 1936 and 1937 Cords as his favorite prewar car design… and considers the Cord Sportsman the Corvette of its day.”

They figured the fifth-generation Corvette would work best for this project given that Marty had already built the PsyClone Motorama tribute car from a C5 and that both the C5 and the Cord had hideaway headlamps. Robert wanted a convertible, so the brothers found a profile shot of a C5 Corvette, laid it on a lightbox, then drafted the CordVette’s design on a blank piece of paper above the profile shot using many of the same elements and lines that Marty had incorporated into his Automobile Quarterly rendering. Marty also did a little Bondo sculpting on a 1/25-scale model of a C5 to see his alterations in three dimensions.

scale CordVette Marty’s proof-of-concept scale version of the CordVette.

“I sketched what I could change without harming the integrity of the ‘Vette and without changing its wheelbase, door openings, top, windows, and structural integrity,” he said. “It’s the same method I used to design the PsyClone.”

Robert tacked the latter sketch to his office wall before finally deciding to take the plunge a few years later. He started by locating a C5 convertible with a manual transmission and tan interior, two of the items that would remain with the car through the conversion. He then spent another few years driving the convertible and fixing minor issues on it before telling Marty in late fall 2019 that the time had come to cut it up.

C5 Corvette Robert’s 2000 Chevrolet Corvette “about an hour before I started cutting it up,” Marty said.

When Marty started work on it in January 2020, stripping the car to its basic structure, he estimated that the project wouldn’t take more than a year. “However, in March of 2020, I casually mentioned ‘wouldn’t it be wicked with suicide doors?’” Marty said. After all, a close look at his Automobile Quarterly rendering shows rear-hinged doors, just as the 810 Sportsman had. “Oops. Well, that turned into an engineering nightmare. Way more restrictions and challenges than I would have ever guessed. I probably have as much time in just suiciding the doors as I have in sculpting the rest of the body.”

rear-hinged Corvette C5 doors The rear-hinged doors after many months of work.

With the doors figured out, Marty then started to reshape the rear of the car before he progressed toward the front. He used a couple of different methods for creating the panels, he said. About half of the panels resulted from his foam sculpture method, in which he carved the shape of the fenders from blocks of foam, then sealed them to use for creating molds from which the actual fiberglass panels could be pulled. The others, he said, “were cast from wood, Bondo, and Masonite molds made with out a male form – only a sketch and dimensions – then assembled in reverse.” He then joined the fiberglass panels to the C5’s structure, preserving not just the hideaway headlamps but also the convertible top.

Robert in the CordVette “This is shot after the doors were hung and the rear shaping roughed in,” Marty said. “Robert is test driving as it hasn’t been started for several months at this point.”

More than two years after starting the project, Marty said he’s “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” with all of the fiberglass panels created and mounted. He’s currently working on extending the door wiring, and he still needs to paint it, but he said he and Robert are both pleased with how the design has evolved from that lightbox sketch and from that long-ago design contest entry.

Photos taken by George Denman at Corvettes of Carlisle 8/24

About the Queen City Chapter of the NCRS

Welcome to the Queen City NCRS serving the Cincinnati and surrounding Tri-State Area

Tom James Queen City Chapter NCRS Chair

Queen City NCRS Various Club Activities