Cars, motorcycles, minibikes pack Flint’s Arrowhead Vets Club for wheels show

Flint, MI — If it weren’t for his late friend Carl “Butch” Glygoroff, Jr., Todd Nickola may not have ended up as the president of the Damned Wheel Club.

In fact, he said, the Damned Wheel Club—a Flint-based club dedicated to anything and everything on wheels—probably wouldn’t exist at all without Glygoroff, who saw it as a way of organizing his and Nickola’s friend group.

“Before he passed he was trying to start this club,” Nickola said. “We were all like, ‘Eh, what do we need to be in a club for?’”

Then, in 2014, Glygoroff passed away in a car accident. 

“We were just a group of friends, so we got together and had this big benefit for his family,” Nickola said. “It was a one-show thing. We had it on a piece of property out in Hadley, [Mich.], and we raised $6,000. So it was like, what can we do with this?”

Nine years later, the Damned Wheel Club is still going strong, Nickola said, building on Glygoroff’s vision.

This past Saturday, July 15, 2023, the club hosted its annual wheel show, called the “Concourse Della Routa” at the Arrowhead Vets Club in Flint’s Carriage Town Neighborhood.

While the group’s first show raised money for Gygoroff’s family, the annual concourse now serves as a fundraiser for the club’s backpacks for the homeless initiative, and gearheads from all over Genesee County came out with cars, motorcycles, minibikes, buggies and bicycles in support.