Sold: Very Special Car Goes For $300,000

TITUSVILLE, Fla. - Perhaps the best way to justify the $300,000 that Roger Judski paid for a classic, canary-yellow 1969 Corvette at a government auction is to say he paid less than half-price.

Valued by the U.S. Marshal's Office at $750,000, the car sold at the forfeiture auction this month in a matter of minutes with only three people bidding: Judski, the owner of Roger's Corvette Center in Maitland, Fla.; Ronnie Rains, a collector from Odessa, Texas; and Greg Joseph, curator for the Otis Chandler Vintage Car Collection in Oxnard, Calif.

Judski said he purchased the car for his business, which specializes in new and used Corvettes, and plans to sell it.

While Judski has acquired other special cars, this is the most he's ever spent on just one, he said.

Joseph said the car is one of two of its kind. His museum owns the only other Corvette ZL-1, and he was hoping to have a matched pair. The car came off the General Motors assembly line in June 1969 after it was ordered by the St. Louis Corvette plant engineer.

Joseph, who buys for the museum that houses more than 100 cars, said it was "one of the best." He said the car's original value was $14,000: $4,000 for the engine and about $10,000 for the body.

But one of the things that makes it rare is the aluminum racing engine.

"This engine was for racing, not for street use," Joseph said.

The engine is factory-rated at 430 horsepower, Joseph said, but he wiggled his eyebrows knowingly at the "low" horsepower rating.

Over the years, the car traveled 55,317 miles among the elite and moneyed, through at least six owners, before it headed down a drug-tainted trail that lead it to the striped tent at Kennedy Space Center, said Pamela Johnson, U.S. Marshal's staff.

Federal agents seized the car in 1990 in Miami after Richard Joseph Lynn was convicted of importing and distributing cocaine, Johnson said. Lynn is serving a sentence of life without parole in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.