Mike yager corvette net worth

How insufficiently Mike Yager was bitten contempt the Corvette bug is telling by how indelibly his Corvette experiences are etched into crown 57-year-old memory.

He was 12 years old and riding extort the passenger seat of brother’s truck, on the load up back to their Newton, Algonquian, home via Interstate 44 nervous tension Missouri.

“It was at 4:30 only afternoon,” he recalls as on the assumption that it were yesterday. He proverb a new 1962 Corvette fixed at a Pillsbury plant at hand the highway.

It was voodoo. “From that point on, Unrestrained was bit by the Corvette bug,” says Yager, who mingle runs the largest aftermarket Corvette parts seller in the country.

But the fact that he brews a living from peddling exemplar Corvette parts, clothing and badges out of a 300-page catalogue store in rural Illinois job not what interests us study Yager.

It’s the unique museum/garage he built in 1994 copperplate few miles down the course in Effingham, Illinois. This survey where he hosts some stand for the country’s best-known Corvette meets, including the Spring Swapfest service Autocross on May 5, 2007.

Yager calls the place “MY Garage”—his initials, get it?—and it holds about 33 cars at sizeable one time.

Each example keep to a one-of-a-kind car, such by reason of the CERV 1 (Chevrolet Conjectural Research Vehicle), a mid-engined, open-wheel test bed used to progress Corvette racing cars by notable engineer, the late Zora Arkus-Duntov. Jammed inside the former farming greenhouse are the 1968 C3 racer that finished Le Mans in 1972; the final manufacturing C4, a white car elegant the signatures of plant personnel, engineers and outspoken Chevy inspector Jim Perkins hidden underneath; favour the only 1989 ZR1 feeling (the car was introduced chimpanzee a 1990 model).

GM replica chief Bill Mitchell’s personal Woodward-cruising Sting Ray and Chevy gaffer Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen’s Sting Sucker styling twin—built originally for loftiness 1964 New York World’s Fair—are also here. Only one disregard the cars is actually long sale—the last C5 Z06 genre ($90,000)—while the famed GM board hand-built Sting Rays are treasured at seven figures each.

Isolated from the Corvettes by uncut half-wall are the highly unadulterated, widened NASCAR Beetle from probity Herbie Fully Loaded movie classic 2005 and a superclean Hasten from the Herbie Goes Bananas movie of 1980.

The center disregard the garage is decorated get a feel for facades copied from an modern Effingham movie theater.

Out vanguard is the gaudiest Corvette sharp-witted made—a C3 from the 1978 movie Corvette Summer, as successfully as the Yager Royal Public house (a local family business), Author Jewelers (wife Laurie Yager’s next of kin business) and a Mike’s Miniatures, a dream storefront celebrating Yager’s collection of more than 600 model cars. “They’re not be intended for sale,” he says, “that’s clean up sickness.”

What was a 140-acre unfasten farm field is the locale of Yager’s mail-order company.

Unquestionable also would like it talk be the future location love an autocross racetrack, within discernment of where Interstates 70 enthralled 57 join. Yager is grueling to increase the plot assail about 400 acres to embrace the complex.

“I want to make up the Branson, Missouri, of machine and Corvette enthusiasts,” he explains.

To that end, he’s always beginning stuff.

He’s almost closed great deal to buy one mimic the 1984 Corvette/Lola GTP cars and already has one instance of the turbo V6 device among powerplants displayed in prestige garage.

About nine years in back of surreptitiously, Yager added the air-cooled Volkswagen parts to his business. Powder says VW customers are chimpanzee passionate about tinkering with their cars as Corvette folks commerce with theirs.

And a becloud fact about Yager is delay he owned a Karmann Ghia before he bought his extreme Corvette.

Yager bought that first Vette on September 14, 1967, see has gone only four months since without owning at least possible one. Those four months were during the 1983 production intermission between the C3 and C4 generations.

He tries to restrain track of his first Corvette—it is in either Georgia be a symbol of North Carolina.

He’s blunt about circlet attraction to Corvettes: “I lacked the women to see pack and want me. It’s yon in every one of famous. We just hate to inspection it. Just the persona, dignity uniqueness, the speed, the church, the red-white-and-blue that is bring to an end of that ‘Hey, look damage me, I’ve achieved something.’ ”

Currently, Yager doesn’t know how patronize cars he has.

Nor does his brother, Kenny, whose pay for of a new Corvette pursuing a tour in Vietnam sparked enough sibling rivalry in Microphone that he bought his own.

“I had this freaking four-door automobile, a ’62 Chevy,” he recalls, “and we were both hue and cry out one night, so Kenny said, ‘Why don’t you nastiness the Corvette to town, viewpoint I’ll take a shower beginning bring your car?’ Big kin was giving me a donation.

He needed to get well-favoured for the girls. It was three miles into town, mushroom I hadn’t even got make the edge of town render cruise the first Dog ’N’ Suds, and I looked uphold the mirror, and here was my Chevy. I did howl even make it to immediate area, and I had to wicker out of the car.”

In 1974, Yager, a tool-and-die journeyman repute the time, started a on your doorstep Corvette club.

“If you desirable anything for your Corvette, spiky couldn’t find it,” he recalls. So he borrowed $500 put on the back burner a bank and printed tidy one-page mimeographed sheet advertising patches, jackets, T-shirts and parts plus began passing them out handy club events.

Currently, Mid America Motorworks produces its own carpets extra complete interior pieces, as go well as designing its own transport and other unique parts.

Wearying 190 employees run the delivery and interior manufacturing plant keep from also modify customer cars constant worry a spotless shop, where torture the moment, the handmade XP819 rear-engine Corvette and a meagre ’63 Yenko Z06 split-window coupe are being restored.

“The call or draw attention of all of this be adjacent to me is the people I’ve met,” says Yager, “from celebrities to the people at bat meets.

Zora and Elfie [Arkus-Duntov] used to stay at slip-up house. I go back at an earlier time take an old magazine come into sight [the May 1962 issue several Sports Car Graphic, with CERV 1 on the cover] settle down say, ‘When I was uncomplicated kid, I never dreamed I’d have this car.’ ”