First Sinkhole Casualty Returns to Corvette Museum

As the old saying goes: when life gives you lemons, make lemon drop shots.

Or something like that. Either way, the good folks at the National Corvette Museum are celebrating turning a bad story into a good one today, as the first retrieved Corvette returns to its pre-sinkhole glory.

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the day the world opened up and swallowed eight museum-quality ‘Vettes. Today, the National Corvette Museum welcomed back the first vehicle pulled from the wreckage, a fully restored 2009 ZR-1 Blue Devil.

The blue beauty was shipped from the Louisville museum to Detroit, where GM performed the restoration. Nearly all of the car had to be redone, according to a WBKO.com report.

At today’s ceremony, celebrants toasted with lemonade, a hat-tip to the old saying. And if you think about it, this really is a case of turning lemons into something more sweet and thirst-quenching. You just can’t buy an ad-campaign that could spread museum interest more quickly than the footage (shown below) of the sink-hole opening up. Consequently, the museum has seen a 66% increase in visitors since the incident.

It’s impossible to gauge just how many of those 8-million plus YouTube views came from people who had never heard of the Corvette Museum. But it’s safe to say they know about the museum now. And I’ll bet you a healthy number of them are interested in seeing one of those fallen Corvettes put back together again. And now they can go to the National Corvette Museum and see just that.

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Photos [WBKO.com and clarksvilleonline.com]