As it turned out, Champaign proved to be just a two-year stopover in the 40-plus year history of Bloomington Gold, which bills itself as the world’s largest Corvette show. After at least a month of rumors, show officials announced Thursday that they will move it yet again, this time to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
“This is quite a change for us,” said Guy Larson, who owns the event. “We did look at other venues, but when the speedway came to our attention, we just worked on moving the show there. It was too great of an opportunity to pass up.”
While the initial year for the show on the grounds of the University of Illinois in Champaign went well, construction on the campus’s Assembly Hall, basketball arena, and football stadium interfered with this year’s show. Vendors at the show, in particular, complained that the construction curtailed their business, according to one local news outlet. “A lot of the areas we used for the show weren’t available, and the construction was supposed to last at least two summers,” Larson said.
Last month, Larson reserved the possibility that Bloomington Gold would only make a temporary move away from Champaign, until the construction ceased, but along with the announcement he noted that the show would remain in Indianapolis for at least three years, “and hopefully beyond. We’ll be there for a while.”
The speedway will allow the Bloomington Gold organizers to add some more driving activities—including laps around the speedway itself, and runs on the autocross course—to the show’s typical slate of activities. While Larson indicated last month that the move away from Champaign could allow the organizers to add an auction in conjunction with the show (Mecum Auctions earlier this year eliminated its Bloomington Gold auction from its lineup), he made no mention yesterday of adding an auction to the 2015 activities.
As its name indicates, Bloomington Gold got its start in 1973 in Bloomington, Illinois, as a one-day show called the Bloomington Corvette Corral. A year later, it expanded to two days, and over the next few years it continued to grow. The show made its first move in 1993 to the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield, then in 1998, then under Dana Mecum’s ownership, moved back to Bloomington. Subsequent moves in 2002 and 2013 took the show, respectively, to St. Charles, Illinois, and to Champaign.
The 2015 Bloomington Gold show will take place June 25 to 27. For more information, visit BloomingtonGold.com.
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