Photo

BRIGHTON, Mich. – “As a kid I’d hop the fence at local dealerships to see the new cars before they were revealed to the public,” said Ken Lingenfelter during a Saturday a tour of his private collection. Mr. Lingenfelter, the son of a General Motors executive, grew up immersed in all things automotive, so when he gained the means, he started buying cars, lots of cars. Many of them were built by the company for which his father had worked.

Mr. Lingenfelter opened his garage to the public as a preamble to the Eyes on Design car show, held last weekend at the former estate of Edsel and Eleanor Ford in Grosse Pointe Shores, Mich. Both the show, which is in its 26th year, and the “garage crawl” were held to benefit the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology, a nonprofit organization supporting the development of technology to aid the visually impaired.

Mr. Lingenfelter’s collection is rarely seen by the public. He owns 250 automobiles, and 175 are stored in the garage I visited. They all fit nicely inside the building, with sufficient room between rows for visitors to view and photograph them. The collection is arranged in a museumlike format, but it is not meant to be a representative sample of the automotive specimens one might find in an actual museum. Mr. Lingenfelter displays the collection primarily to benefit charitable causes. The collection emphasizes postwar cars with a tilt toward one automaker.

“The focus is on cars I like,” he said. “That’s what I’ve bought – mostly General Motors cars because of how I grew up.”

Photo

Among the G.M. products in his collection are more than 40 Corvettes. “The ’63 split-window hooked me on Corvettes,” Mr. Lingenfelter said. “I bought my first one in the ’70s, but became serious about collecting them when I was in a financial position to do it – about 25 years ago.”

But the collection also features more exotic cars. Among the ones I was shown during a leisurely tour were a 2008 Lamborghini Reventón, a 2011 Ferrari 599 GTO, a 1990 Ferrari F40, a 1985 Ferrari 288 GTO, a rare 1988 Porsche 959 and a Bugatti Veyron – the third one sold in the United States.

Mr. Lingenfelter planned to exhibit the Ferrari 288 GTO and the Porsche 959 at the next day’s Eyes on Design show and said that both would be driven to the event in Grosse Pointe shores, about 50 miles away.

Among Mr. Lingenfelter’s domestic cars, one of the most interesting is a 1955 Chevrolet Corvette Duntov Mule. The car is a preproduction version that G.M. used to test its new V-8 engine. It was later given to Chevrolet engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov, who modified it for speed-record attempts. Another of Mr. Lingenfelter’s prized Corvettes is a supercharged 1953 model, one of only two that he says McCulloch Motors Corporation produced for G.M. A Callaway-built Corvette Speedster he owns is visually striking and, says Mr. Ligenfelter, capable of doing 210 miles per hour. Most production Corvette models are represented in the collection as well.

Photo

But the car that caught my eye was a 1965 Pontiac Catalina 2+2 with a 421 cubic-inch tri-power engine. While Mr. Lingenfelter may have pined for Corvettes in his youth, I was in love with the big Pontiacs that ran the superspeedways at the time. The Catalina 2+2 was the closest thing you could get to a production model.

The collection also includes a number of vehicles produced by Lingenfelter Performance Engineering in Decatur, Ind. The company markets vehicle performance conversions, engine packages, superchargers and other high-performance components. Among the Ligenfelter products on display were Corvettes re-bodied to resemble the split-window coupes Mr. Lingenfelter loved, as well as contemporary Camaros transformed to look like Pontiac Trans-Ams.

While Ken Lingenfelter is the owner of the performance business, it was founded by a distant cousin, John Lingenfelter, an automotive engineer who won numerous auto-racing championships. He was critically injured in a racing accident in 2002 and died in 2003 at age 58. Ken Lingenfelter, who amassed his personal fortune in the real estate settlement industry, bought his cousin’s enterprise about six years ago.

Photo