The last time we nosed around Cleetus’s neck of the woods with the Auction Mistake Corvette, it was right about the time he absolutely and utterly fragged the engine while on a dragstrip pass. The short story: he turned a lot of late-model GM truck motor to absolute junk. He decimated the engine the C6 came with, so it was off to a wrecking yard to locate a new builder motor. He found one in a Chevrolet Tahoe that looked like it had tried to ram a bollard. He didn’t get the whole engine (towards the end of the engine extraction, it was discovered that the heads had cracked due to the force of the crash) but he did get the basic block, which has been cleaned up and prepared for assembly. This time around, though, a touch more care is being put into the little red Corvette’s bullet in the name of longevity, like gapped rings.

There’s no doubt that this 5.3L is going to be ran ragged every chance that Cleetus gets, but at least he’s got some skin in the game since he’s actually gone in with the engine build here. We hope to see the car at Bowling Green at some point, man…we’re digging the scrounging through parts approach!