Lucas Bell 
As if the vehicle program needed any more attention, there’s this. Two General Motors employees learned rather publicly what these repercussions look like after being arrested while driving a pair of C8 Corvettes in Bowling Green, Kentucky. And it went as far as making CNN. Good job.
According to the Kentucky State Police, a state trooper stopped Alexander Thim and Mark Derkatz in the evening on January 8, while the two were exceeding the posted 45-mph speed limit by more than 26 mph. It was later reported by Kentucky’s WNKY that Thim was clocked driving one Corvette at 120 mph, while his partner-in-crime Derkatz was busted at 100 mph. The two were stopped for speeding, reckless driving, and racing motor vehicles on a public road. A third Corvette was on the scene, but allegedly did not engage in the street race.
The cars were impounded, and the engineers were booked. The twenty-something engineers posted $1,000 bail and are now scheduled for a pretrial hearing at Warren District Court on February 18.
A look into the two arrested GM engineers’ LinkedIn profiles shows that Thim is a CAE engineer who works on induction systems and exhaust, while Merkatz is an electrical engineer. There is no word yet as to whether or not the two will keep their jobs with the General following this incident. Regardless, they’re now legends around the office water cooler.
This isn’t the first public road Corvette C8 incident that caught the attention of the media. Not long after its official reveal in July of 2019, a GM engineer smashed up a pre-production Stingray around a mountain road bend out west.
With help from the Tremec eight-speed dual-clutch transmission, the C8 Corvette is able to launch harder than any Vette before, completing the sprint to 60 mph in just 2.8 seconds before running the quarter mile in 11.2 seconds, making it a formidable drag racer. With figures like that, one does not have to have their right foot on the go pedal for very long before every speed limit in the country is in the rearview.
The whole ordeal is not the best look for the Corvette brand, especially considering the fact that this took place in Bowling Green, despite the cities love for America’s sports car. Both the Corvette manufacturing facility and the National Corvette Museum are located in the small Kentucky city.
