CBX's Rick Barrack Doesn't Just Collect Corvettes—He's Also a Master Judge

The night before his 16th birthday, Rick Barrack camped out at the DMV in Louisville, Ky., to get his driver’s license first thing in the morning. The eagerness to get behind the wheel of his prized silver-and-red 1979 Chevrolet Camaro didn’t end there—he was pulled over for speeding on the very first drive. “That was quite the christening of my first automobile,” he laughed. His enthusiasm for cars was “in my DNA from a very early age,” he said. Barrack, chief creative officer and co-founder of packaging and visual identity agency CBX, came from an automotive family. In 1941, his grandfather started a junkyard business with—legend has it—a single penny, and his father later took over the business. During summers, Barrack worked in the basement, stocking car parts and sweeping floors. So where did branding and design come in? “From a very early age, I was drawing, I was creating," he said. "So the automotive world was really put on a shelf for many years until I got a little older, where I could have some time to dive back into it.” After he started working in New York, Barrack commuted from New Jersey with Bill Berenter, then chair of creative agency Berenter Greenhouse & Webster. On those long rides, “[Berenter] was always reading automotive magazines about vintage models and the collecting of them.” Barrack realized what he was missing, and when his wife encouraged him to attend a car auction 10 years ago, he fell in love with the energy and unique cars. He developed a special interest in a specific model of Chevrolet: the Corvette. At the time, “I, quite frankly, didn't know a Corvette from a school bus,” he said. Guiding him were luminaries Terry Michaelis, president of ProTeam Classic Corvette Collection and Sales, and David Burroughs, creator of the judging and certification criteria at the Bloomington Gold Corvette show. Barrack now owns five Corvettes and is a 400-level master judge with the National Corvette Restorers Society. He’s on the road about 10 weekends a year at shows and auctions, as well as consulting for private owners and fielding questions from the broader Corvette community. “It's a passion, and it helps me be distracted from the branding and design business but also gives me a great outlet to come back recharged and inspired,” he said. "You can't drive a fast car and not have a good time.” As a judge, Barrack specializes in the years 1963-67, when Corvette was making its “paradigm-shifting” Sting Ray. He spends much of his free time learning about how the cars were designed, assembled and, of course, how the brand was built. “I appreciate design in all forms, both in what I do from a branding perspective as well as from industrial to architecture,” he said. “[Corvette] is an iconic brand that even most people that are not in the car world know and recognize. And today, these really are more than automobiles—they are works of art.”