Motorheads of Shelbyville - prepare to drool

I know we have quite a few gear heads and classic car geeks in the area, with their own street even set aside in Shelbyville for parts, fixing up, tuning up and such. So when I saw this, I figured it might set some tongues to wagging...

Larry Fisette had no idea whether he was buying King Tut's tomb or Al Capone's vault when he agreed to buy 21 trailers said to be full of Corvettes and Chevrolet muscle cars and parts. Luckily, all of the rumors he had heard whispered around his northeast Wisconsin home turned out to be more true than he ever dreamed.

So far, Fisette, a De Pere, Wisconsin, restorer and automotive repair shop proprietor, has opened 17 of the 21 sealed trailers one-by-one and found a Yenko Camaro with 45,000 miles; a pair of low-mileage 1970 LS-6 Chevelles; a 1972 Camaro Z/28; two 1957 Corvettes, one a fuel-injected car, the other a dual-four-barrel-equipped example; and several other Chevrolet performance cars. Filling in the space around the cars like water around pebbles is an inventory of NOS and used performance parts that would make a Nickey Chevrolet parts manager jealous, and Fisette is not done cracking trailers open. He's also confident there's more muscle hidden in the trailers.

Kinda makes your engine light come on just thinking about it, huh?

"I hadn't seen inside any of the trailers. I did it all on Donny's reputation," Fisette said. "The first trailer I opened had two [1970 Chevelle] LS-6s in it," he said. "It was absolutely total amazement." The Chevelles were parked bumper-to-bumper in the trailer, and the first he gazed upon was a gold four-speed, bench-seat car that Fisette soon realized was the LS-6 Chevelle his neighbor bought new. Fisette even remembers the day the neighbor brought it home from the dealership and showed it to him. Regardless of his memory of the car, Fisette prefers the Chevelle parked in front of the gold, four-speed car: a blue Chevelle with bucket seats and an automatic transmission, which he considers more driveable.

Unearthing the Yenko Camaro shortly thereafter was obviously an exciting experience for Fisette, but it was opening a trailer full of factory performance engines that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

"The most exciting moment was when I opened up a trailer and saw shiny engines up one side and down the other, and then two stacked shelves of them," Fisette recalled. More than 150 high-performance engines have been found, in addition to 14 nice, low-mileage cars, but the bulk of trailers contain parts. And lots of them.

I want that Chevelle!