The Corvette Hunter. Tyler Greenblatt

Bob Essex and how he could find him to begin tracing the car. “Yes, Kevin, the guy is just a rich ***hole. I don’t like the guy; we had a big fallout.”

      “Frankie’s a bit of a hothead also,” according to Kevin. “But this guy Bob Essex was also a hothead, so that’s probably where those guys clashed. I asked where Bob Essex lived.”

      “I don’t know, Kevin, the guy’s some rich guy, I don’t know much about him. I was with him for not even a year. We raced at Daytona, raced at Sebring, then we had a big fallout. We were supposed to go to The Glen, but he did his own thing and I cut ties with him. That’s all I can tell you.”

      “How do you spell Essex?” Kevin asked.

      “I don’t know, E-S-S-E-X?”

      Kevin started by going through all the phone books in the area looking for Robert Essex. He went to the library for more phone books once his local ones turned into dead ends. He repeated “E-S-S-E-X” every time he ran his finger down the page. Nothing.

      Then an idea popped into his head. “To race at Sebring or Daytona you gotta have a special racing license through the SCCA. I contacted the SCCA, and the guy who ran the archives department was a guy named Harry Hanley. I told him I was looking for a guy named Robert Essex, E-S-S-E-X; he raced a 1969 Corvette.”

      A week later Harry Hanley called him back, asking if he was sure he had the right spelling. Kevin said that he wasn’t sure; he’s a very bad speller. Hanley told him he had found a Robert Esseks, spelled E-S-S-E-K-S, and gave him an old address.

      “E-S-S-E-K-S!” Kevin shouted when he got off the phone. “A K instead of an X, goddammit!”

      Kevin found out that Esseks had moved nine times since then. As he went through telephone books all over again, he still couldn’t find anything. Finally, he discovered a woman in Queens, New York, named Patricia Esseks. He called her and said he was looking for Robert Esseks.

      “What do you want with that jerk?” came the woman’s voice on the other end.

      Although he assumed he had the right guy, Kevin asked if he used to race Corvettes.

      “Oh yeah,” she replied. “He raced Corvettes and Cobras. Look, we had a bad marriage, and I don’t like the guy. He’s alive somewhere in Connecticut. Don’t call here ever again. I don’t want to hear that name ever again. Now I’m all upset.”

      She hung up the phone, but at least Kevin learned that Bob Esseks was alive and in Connecticut. After months of searching, he turned up nothing, and asked a law enforcement customer of his to help him run the name Robert Esseks. E-S-S-E-K-S.

      Esseks, as it turned out, was living on a boat, had a Connecticut driver’s license, and a P.O. Box. Kevin wrote him a letter.

      “I had to lie and tell him I had the car,” Kevin says. “I knew where the car came from, who drove the car, who had the car, and who worked on the car. I was afraid that if I told him I was looking for it, he’d clam right up. I couldn’t take that chance with all this documentation. I knew that Corvette better than anybody, and after all the research and collecting I had done on it, I had to find out who had the car. So I told him I had the car already.”

      It didn’t take Esseks long to call Kevin back after receiving his letter. “So you got my old race car, huh?” he said. Kevin points out that he was very nice over the phone, hardly living up to the reputation of those closest to him. He then relayed the same story that Frank had already told Kevin about the trip to Engineering in Detroit, wanting a burgundy car instead of a red one, and how Frank picked it up and drove it back from Gene Jantzen Chevrolet to break in the engine. He said that when they campaigned the car at Daytona a wheel fell off and they were disqualified.