Mike McElhattan received a message a few months ago from a guy in New Mexico who said he wanted to sell a DeLorean — the unique early-1980s car with gull-wing doors and a stainless steel exterior made famous in the “Back to the Future” movies.
McElhattan, who buys and sells the cars and owns a DeLorean repair shop in Crystal Lake, inquired further about the man’s offer despite knowing he wouldn’t take the 1,300 mile drive to pick up the car.
As it turned out, the DeLorean DMC-12 belonged to the guy’s 90-year-old uncle living near Waukesha, Wisconsin, about 60 miles from McElhattan’s shop, DeLorean Midwest, so he made the trip.
“The car was absolutely filthy. It had been sitting in a gravel floor barn, tucked away in a dark corner,” McElhattan said. Mice had also already claimed almost every spot in the vehicle.
But McElhattan couldn’t leave it there.
The odometer showed a mere 977 miles, and the rest of the rear-engine, two-seat sports car seemed to be in fairly good shape, even accounting for the dirt and mouse droppings.
The car was built in April 1981, making the barn find one of the earliest of the roughly 9,000 produced by the DeLorean Motor Co. between January 1981 and 1983 in Northern Ireland.
The company was started by John DeLorean, who had risen through the ranks at GM, where he managed the development of the Pontiac GTO — the first muscle car — and other performance cars.
He left GM in 1973 and later created the DeLorean Motor Co. with backing from investors including Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr. The company went bankrupt in 1982. DeLorean was later charged with selling cocaine to prop up his books, but was acquitted in 1984. He died in 2005.
The barn-find DeLorean DMC-12 had been kept by a car dealer for personal use after it was manufactured. It was sold around 1991 and was parked for years until McElhattan bought it in September.
It had last been driven circa 2005, when it was taken once up and down a long farmhouse driveway.
Since arriving at DeLorean Midwest, the car’s engine runs and its exterior has been fully cleaned and re-grained.
“Underneath all the barn-find filth, I was really pleased to see that the paint on the front and rear bumper is really in excellent condition and the finish on the wheels has really held up and is in very nice, original condition,” McElhattan said.
Next, the interior needs to be cleaned. It could require an entire disassembly to rid it of dust, dirt and mouse remnants. Luckily so far, McElhattan hasn’t found any evidence of chewing or scratching of the upholstery and carpeting.
The car also still needs its fuel, brake and cooling systems rebuilt, as well as any other mechanical refurbishments along the way.
McElhattan hopes to have the car restored and sold after next year, but “the car is definitely growing on me,” he admits.
“It’s a unique car with a cool story … We tend to buy really nice condition, low-mileage cars and some of them are really kind of painful to sell, but it’s part of being in the business. I can’t keep them all,” he said, noting that he owns two other DeLoreans.
The Crystal Lake shop has had more than 1,200 of them come through for service since it opened in 2007. About 80 are brought in each year for jobs like oil changes and frame-off restorations.
Ten to 15 of them are sold each year at market value, which is about $55,000 according to Classic.com, a website that tracks market pricing for classic cars.
McElhattan’s passion for the car sparked in the late 1990s when he attended an auction with his brother, who wound up buying one.
Seven years later, he had earned an associate’s degree in automotive technology, and with five years of experience working on cars, he became a then-new shop’s first DeLorean technician. McElhattan and his wife bought the shop in 2016.
Looking to the future, he’d love to see the DeLorean Motor Co. deliver on its 2022 announcement of a new electric version of the classic car.
“That car is so much different, having an electric drivetrain and it being all new, modern technology,” he said. “I don’t think it would compete with somebody interested in the original car … so I see it can only do good things for the classic cars that we work on.”
