My beloved Lauren is 27 today, having come off the line on November 16th, 1984 (an early 1985).

Some pictures that chronicle her life with me:




Coming off the truck on March 5th, 2004. Dirty - all the way from Oregon to Pennsylvania.





Desperate times call for desperate measures - something has to cover the holes where the Oregon front plate was.





An early family picture.





A beauty shot in late April 2004.





Glamour at the 2004 NCRS Wildwood Regional - parked between two 1967 big blocks.

She is holding up much better than most of us ;-)

More shots:




Ivelis took this picture of me driving off the show floor at Wildwood - I did not yet know that we had managed to Top Flight the car by the skin of our teeth.





The heritage shot: parked next to a Silver Blue 1958 at the Corvettes at Glasstown show in South Jersey in September 2004.





Dave signs.





This is the point where Andy told me that he thought I might actually be getting somewhere with car.





Ivelis still calls this the brochure shot.

Yet more shots:




A vanity plate for the holidays in December 2005.





Jim Strathearn's excellent work in mid 2008.





The "diner shot" after six years of ownership in March 2010.





The hardest thing I've ever done with this car - getting Lauren an NCRS Performance Verification in May 2011.


That's all - for now.

Very Nice. What is the story about finding Lauren and getting her from Oregon to PA?

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Found her on the internet at a BMW dealership in Salem, Oregon. Sent an inspection/appraisal service to look at it. What they sent me was actually a little tougher on the car than I would have been.

Bought the car for not too much money and had her shipped in a shared open trailer across the country (closed trailer costs would have close to what I paid for the car).

Lemme see what I remember... It's hard to believe it's been that long. You and Lauren just seem to belong, if you know what I mean.

IIRC, you started the search in 2003, at least. Well, that's when you told me about it. And you searched - I will let you explain the why's, I will only share my .02 in the project.

So I just started watching paper ads, sent a few maybes, but they all ended up being 2-tone. You can't tell in the shadows, and the ad only said "blue." Made it hard...

I don't remember exactly how you found this in Oregon, but I remember when you DID. And then about 3 weeks later, you drove it down to Dover for the Gordon Killebrew gathering with John Porter.

Talk about a lifetime ago...

For the most part, my input has been technical and moral support. John knows so much more about how these cars SHOULD be vs how I want them to be. ;) very subtle difference. I am not going to pretend to know date codes for thermostats...

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I still have pictures of that trip down to Dover. I knew next to nothing about the car and it had issues. A part of me remains convinced that you headed out to California shortly thereafter to avoid becoming my live-in electronics specialist.

From "A 21st Century Road Trip", published in 2006:

"
Unlike Grace’s near perfection, my other Corvette is most definitely a work in progress. Lauren, a 1985 coupe, was purchased over the Internet from Delon BMW in Salem in February 2004 after spending her entire life in Oregon. After having it shipped eastward across the United States and getting a handle on what the issues were, I started restoring it in earnest in the summer of 2004, just after having it judged for the first time. Restoration is definitely an iterative process, but every six months I can look back on obvious improvement and my scores in National Corvette Restorers Society (NCRS) Flight Judging have confirmed this impression.

Lauren is a classic example of buying the car you wanted when you were a teenager. Why the rather unusual color, you might ask, instead of the more popular red or black? For the record, that color is light blue metallic, and I have two reasons. Reason number one is that, when this version of the Corvette was new, many of the cover Corvettes on the automobile magazines of the day were this color. Reason two comes back to me: the first C4 Corvette I ever saw was light blue metallic. I worked part time at a Chevrolet dealership in the mid-80s and I’ll never forget seeing that car for the first time, headlights up, fancy new metallic paint with clear coat looking its best in the setting sun. A visceral moment for a fifteen year old — the exact point where my opinion of Corvettes changed from grudging respect (I was more of a Pontiac and BMW fan) to “I will have one of those some day.”

There’s one more thing I think you might be wondering — where does the name come from? Lauren is named after Lauren Hutton — a classy 1980s model.
"

Great story, John.

Errr, how much oil did you have to wipe off after that trip under a Ford pickup???

She is looking great for her age

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There was oil and so much dirt, which I was completely unprepared for - I brought no cleaning materials. I drove the few miles home from the pickup point in a completely unfamiliar car, with little visibility, badly worn tires, and horrible alignment. I didn't even know how to turn the lights on.

Good stuff John.....I enjoyed the pics....I like your C5 also.

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Thanks, Marcus!

HHhmmmm! You're Corvette was Dale Jarret Edition?


Congrats on the B-day.

Very nice, John.

Have you ever made an actual photo album....ie, not on the computer?

I have probably over a thousand pictures of the car in various states of (dis)repair and have never printed them out. I've always wanted to. I think if you made a "coffee table" book of the cars that would be cool.

Matthew

Beautiful car, color, great photos.
Nice work.

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Hey! He did drive Chevy's for a while - even won the Daytona 500 in a Lumina.

The short form: Ivelis was a member of the Dale Jarrett fan club for a little while (don't ask). One of the things you got was a license plate. When Lauren showed up, it was the only extra license plate in the house.