Hagerty Aside from paint and the vinyl top, Hagerty employees did all the restoration work on this 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS.TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. – Companies often engage in team-building activities, from the old-fashioned falling backward and trusting your co-workers to catch you exercise to boot camplike expeditions with zip lines. Then there’s Hagerty Insurance, which specializes in insuring classic cars and wooden boats. At Hagerty, a family-owned company based here at the little finger of the Michigan mitten, team building, naturally, means restoring a classic car.
Recently, 123 employees donated 2,750 hours of labor, made 900 telephone calls chasing down parts, worked through 215 lunch breaks, used three tubes of super glue to repair cracked fingertips and, according to the project Web site, uttered “too many four-letter words to count” as they brought a decimated 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS back to life.
Some of those employees were vintage vehicle experts, but many others were getting their first hands-on education in automotive restoration.
“We spent the day learning the proper way to weld and attempted to put those theories in practice,” two employees posted on the blog following the car’s progress.
“Today we scraped metal and sanded things smooth,” another wrote.
The Camaro was a rust-free California car totaled in a front-end collision, or so it was believed. When the team began taking it apart, it discovered that the car had been involved in at least three other collisions and had suffered through subpar repair work.
“It was a great experience to see what our clients do every day,” one group of staffers reported after a day of removing door dents, repairing interior panels and degreasing and sand-blasting assorted parts.
Not only does such a project provide team-building for the staff, but it also helps connect employees with their car-collecting clients. This the Hagerty team’s second restoration effort, following the resurrection of a 1930 Model A Ford.
For their hours of labor, the employees get to drive the Camaro, checking it out of the company garage for such events like weddings and family reunions. All the work was done by Hagerty staff except the application of the orange paint and the final fitting of the car’s vinyl top.
First, however, beginning on June 22, Tabetha Salisbury and Tricia Felski, Hagerty employees, will take the car on tour. Ms. Salisbury will be driving and Ms. Felski navigating in the Great Race, an annual vintage vehicle rally that this year follows the banks of the Mississippi River from Minnesota’s Twin Cities to the Gulf Coast at Mobile, Ala.
The tour also includes visits to a car show in Wisconsin, a concours d’élégance in Michigan, the Woodward Dream Cruise in Detroit and the annual autumn antique auto festival at Hershey, Pa. Somewhere in there the Camaro will also go to Toronto as part of the Hagerty Driving Experience, which introduces young drivers to manipulating manual transmissions. The Camaro is powered by a 325-horsepower, 396-cubic-inch big block V-8 mated to a 4-speed manual gearbox.
As Hagerty’s Web site puts it, the Camaro was “proudly salvaged, sandblasted, pounded and polished by the employees of Hagerty,” whose work brought the car back to the road and back to its original configuration. Well, with one exception: They added a second speaker to the factory-installed audio system.
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