There are few gut-punches in this hobby quite like watching someone peel out of a parking lot in a car you spent years building with your own two hands. That’s exactly the nightmare a handful of enthusiasts woke up to at the kickoff of the 2026 Hot Rod Power Tour, when an organized crew slipped into a Joliet, Illinois hotel lot overnight and rolled out with two Corvettes and a Camaro. A few other cars got banged up in the process for good measure.
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A Packed Lot Full of Rare Machines Was the Draw
The hit went down in the dead of night, while most of the crew was fast asleep at a Holiday Inn & Suites in Joliet. Park that many rare, desirable, expensive machines together in tight little clusters and you’ve basically built a buffet. To an organized thief, a packed lot of muscle cars isn’t a celebration, it’s a menu.
Per CBS, the haul included two Corvettes, one of them a C7 Z06 packing the track-hungry Z07 package, plus a Camaro. A Chevy SS, a second Camaro, and a Dodge Challenger all got roughed up but stayed put.
This Wasn’t a Smash-and-Grab. It Was a Planned Job.
Losses like these sting way more than the number on an insurance form. Enthusiasts pour time, money, and frankly a piece of their soul into these builds, and a cross-country road trip with your people is supposed to be the reward for all that sweat. The owner of the stolen C7 Z06, who only wanted to go by Michael, summed up the gut-punch in an interview, wondering aloud why some folks would rather take from others than put a little good back into the world.
And Michael wasn’t the only one in his crew who got burned. He was rolling with his brother-in-law, whose car also vanished in the night. That one actually turned up, in Dolton, Illinois, but the reunion was bittersweet, because it had already been wrecked. Joliet police teamed up with Dolton officers, but by the time anyone got there, several people had scattered from the crash scene and nobody was arrested.
Investigators are pretty confident this wasn’t some opportunistic joyride. Joliet Police Sgt. Dwayne English noted that while no suspects have been named and no arrests have been made, the whole thing has the fingerprints of a planned operation. The tell: every single owner still has their original keys in hand, which points hard toward key fob-cloning tech used to outsmart the cars’ electronics.
If you know anything, authorities want to hear from you: the Tri-County Auto Theft Task Force can be reached at 815-724-4677 or by email at tcat@joliet.gov. For the owners who bled into these builds, the wish is a simple one, that their machines find their way home in one piece.
And honestly, the timing is almost too on-the-nose. This year’s tour was put together as a love letter to Route 66, the legendary highway hitting the century mark, all while the country celebrates its 250th birthday. So you’ve got thousands of cherished American machines gathered to toast a chunk of American history, and somebody decided to treat it like a self-serve lot.
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