Restomod And Classic Corvettes Drive The Mecum Story At Nashville’s Inaugural Big-Tent Event

With Barrett-Jackson, the king of no-reserve big-tent auctions, recently closing out their 2026 season at Las Vegas, the Restomod Corvette versus Classic Mid-Year intrigue swings squarely toward Mecum. And remarkably, after wrapping up its inaugural Nashville extravaganza, Mecum still has four more events on the calendar before it calls the 2026 season complete. That will bring Mecum’s annual auction total to a staggering thirteen events, compared with just four on Barrett-Jackson’s 2026 docket, and that difference alone tells you just how important Mecum has become to our hobby. When Dana Mecum opened the doors to his first auction back in 1988, we’d be willing to bet nobody could have imagined where this wild ride would eventually lead—especially when it comes to Corvettes. Today, Mecum has become a global Corvette auction juggernaut, with 2026 seeing 1,084 Corvettes offered to enthusiasts worldwide and 772 hammering off to new owners. That’s quite a leap from their 1988 beginning.

The Mecum Story: A Road From Ruin To Collector-Car Royalty

Before building this premier auction empire, founder Dana Mecum spent decades gaining deep business insight through his family’s long history of operating new car dealerships. Leveraging this background, he organized his very first collector car auction in 1988 at Rockford Airport in Illinois, only to be hit immediately by a disastrous storm with 90 mph winds that left the venue in ruins and the young company deep in debt. Refusing to concede defeat, Mecum entered a grueling 14-year survival mode in which the business failed to turn a profit and stayed afloat only through funds from separate automotive ventures. This perseverance ultimately paved the way for an incredible ascent; by pioneering high-volume muscle car auctions and expanding into live-streamed digital bidding, Mecum Auctions became what our exclusive tracker below illustrates—with its single flagship Kissimmee event alone capable of generating a staggering $450 million in sales.

The Corvette Inventory Paradox: Fewer Cars, More Buyers

But not so quickly on all things being rosy in Mecum-land. While Mecum’s sell-through rates are up across the majority of venues since our expanded tracker began in 2024, Corvette inventory is still down at every single venue during the same time period. The team at CorvSport has various theories: perhaps the growing convenience and volume of online auction giants like Bring a Trailer are siphoning off cars that once would have traveled to a live Mecum event; maybe putting a Corvette through a major live auction requires a greater commitment from sellers, from transporting the car to the venue to making the logistical arrangements surrounding the sale; or perhaps, quite simply, owners are holding tighter to their beloved Corvettes because replacing them has become increasingly expensive.

It could be one of those factors, a combination of all three, or something else entirely—but the numbers themselves are hard to ignore. At Kissimmee and Indy, for example, our tracker shows Corvette inventory down 27.8%, representing 239 fewer Corvettes, even as 9 of 12 Mecum venues have improved their sell-through rates. In short, Mecum may be bringing fewer Corvettes to the party, but the ones making it through the doors are finding buyers at an increasingly impressive clip. How will Nashville stack up?