DIANE FITZGERALD IS CREATING PATHWAYS TO CAREERS IN THE COLLECTOR CAR INDUSTRY borellimotorsports.com • June 8, 2016 Perhaps you’ve attended a Concours d’Elegance event or a collector car show ‘n’ shine. Or maybe you couldn’t help staring at a parade of classic cars as they cruised by in the street. In any case, admit it. If you love automobiles, it’s impressive to see these vintage and exotic cars still looking great and performing well. And maybe you thought it’s a pretty cool hobby. Well, it’s cool all right. But it’s way more than a hobby.
A BILLION-DOLLAR INDUSTRY In 2013, the value of collector cars sold at auction in the U.S. passed the $1 billion mark for the first time, reaching a total of $1.3 billion — according to data from Hagerty, the leader in collector car insurance. And that doesn’t include person-to-person transactions, which account for the lion’s share of all collector car sales. Equally important, the $1.3 billion doesn’t reflect the enormous amount of money that’s invested annually to restore, preserve and enhance these extraordinarily valuable vehicles. All together, that adds up to tens of billions of dollars. To handle the demanding challenges of working on these special vehicles, there’s an ongoing need for a large pool of highly qualified, professionally trained technicians. This is where Diane Fitzgerald, national director of RPM Foundatoion, and her team of ambassadors come in. “We’re both a service and resource provider and a scholarship and grant-giving entity,” Diane said. “My responsibility is to raise funds for student scholarships and grants for equipment and parts, and to spearhead outreach to high schools and colleges nationwide that could benefit from our support.”
LEMAY – AMERICA’S CAR MUSEUM IN TACOMA RPM is an outgrowth of the nation’s foremost showcase for collector cars: LeMay – America’s Car Museum in Tacoma, Washington. The four-story, 165,000 sq. ft. museum contains 18 exhibit galleries, which regularly rotate exhibitions such as “History of the Ford Truck” or “BMW: Propelling a Century of Innovation” — so there’s always something new to see. The museum’s car collection consists of 250 automobiles spanning more than 100 years of automotive history, plus another 100 vehicles on loan from private collections. Not surprisingly, since opening in 2012 the ACM has attracted 600,000 paid visitors from all 50 states and 42 foreign countries to the city of Tacoma — which generously donated the nine acres of land needed to get the museum off the ground. In the planning stages for almost a decade before it opened, the museum merged with the Collectors Foundation, the predecessor to the Hagerty Education Program and now RPM Foundation. Today, Diane and her team at RPM — which consists of one paid associate, ten volunteer ambassadors across the U.S. and one in Germany — are proud to carry on the legacy and mission of the Collectors Foundation to support young people and help drive the future of the collector car community.