- April 26, 2024
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Downtown Flagler beach gleamed Sunday with the chrome of 180 Corvettes parked along the streets for the 12th annual Corvettes at the Beach show.
The show was hosted by the Flagler Beach Corvette Club, and included contests for the coolest cars.
For some of the entrants, automobiles — and Corvettes in particular — are a passion. Flagler Beach Corvette Club President Paul Kachura, 62, has owned more than 200 cars, he said.
“I’ve had a little bit of everything in cars in my lifetime,” he said. “But beside race cars, the Corvette has been my lifelong car. It’s a true American sports car.”
Kachura brought his ’64 Coupe to the show, along with a ’79 Coupe he’d given to his girlfriend as a birthday present. “She said, ‘Well, it isn’t a ring, but it’ll work,’” he said.
As visitors admired the cars, many of them from the ‘60s and ‘70s, 28 judges in yellow T-shirts strolled around with clipboards, inspecting paint jobs and interiors and looking under the hoods to check engines.
Many of the cars they checked came from outside the county. The Citrus County Corvette Club brought 16 cars, and the best of show award went to Kissimmee resident Bill Tucker, for his 1969 Corvette.
About 30 cars at the show were brought by the Flagler County Corvette Club, which was chartered in ’98 with only six members and now has more than 100.
Liz and Floyd Binkley were there at the beginning.
“There was just a group of us that had Corvettes, and we thought it’d be cool to have a Corvette club here is Flagler County, Liz Binkley said.
The Binkleys brought the purple ’98 Corvette C5 they bought, sight unseen, on eBay eight year ago.
Floyd Binkley got his first car — a 1950 Plymouth — from his grandfather at age 14, as a reward for feeding his cows one winter, and “it was all downhill from there,” he said, chuckling. Two years later, he bought a Chevrolet Impala. He began tinkering and, eventually, buying cars cheap and hen selling them for a profit.
He got his first Corvette in 1975, and has owned, so far, 337 cars, he said.
But for speed, one car at the show beat out all the others: the 2013 Daytona Prototype race car, which had three wins in races last year, according to Spirit of Daytona Racing team manager Troy Flis.
Next year, Flis said, it will compete in 11 more, as far away as Canada and California. “It has a top speed of just over 200 mph at Daytona,” Flis said.
But, Flis said, the team also plans to come out to next year’s Corvettes at the Beach show.
“They do a great event,” he said. “We’ll be here as much as we can.”
