Background
When Prince (RIP) sang ‘Little Red Corvette’ he was really singing about what he got up to one Saturday night, and as this is a family-friendly website we better leave it there. But we can use words like ‘sex appeal’ without offending anyone, and that’s exactly what the Corvette Stingray offered.
Sex appeal, or a lack of it, was the reason Chevrolet needed the Corvette. The first six-cylinder cars were more mouth than trousers but by the end of the 1950s, America’s one true sports car had the performance to go with those glamorous looks. The second generation C2 followed in 1963 with its much more aggressive, shark-like shape, though the name that was chosen was that of another cartilaginous fish: the Sting Ray, rendered as two words.
In 1968 that shape developed swooping Coke-bottle contours and the C2 Sting Ray became the C3 Stingray (just one word now), bodied in glass-fibre like its predecessors. Unlike almost every other American car of the era, the Corvette sailed from season to season with no more than the occasional detail change or facelift, and that’s one reason the shape has become such an icon: a 1968 Stingray and a 1982 version are recognisably the same car, despite differences to nose and tail.
The biggest changes for the C3 came in 1973 and ’74. First, the pretty metal blade of a front bumper was dropped in favour of an impact-absorbing urethane nose that added two and a half stone of weight. Then in the following year the car’s Kamm-style tail was rounded off and given deeply inset rear lights. As classic cars, the steel-bumper Stingrays belong to the 1960s muscle-car era while those that came later are somewhat less valued, both for their looks and the ever-decreasing power outputs.
‘Vettes always came with a dizzying choice of engines but the firm favourite was the small-block V8, especially in 350 cu in form introduced in 1969. It dropped from 270hp in 1971 to 200hp in 1972, but only on paper – Chevrolet and many others were obliged to stop quoting gross flywheel horsepower figures and quote something more realistic. Still, neither year was exactly slow…0-60mph in 6.8 seconds.
Another feature that remained current from 1968 to ’72 was the choice of a convertible or a coupé body, the latter featuring removable Targa panels and a removable rear window…though you still had to slide it all in behind the back seats as the Stingray didn’t develop a lifting tailgate until the last Collector Edition in 1982.
Nowadays they’re nailed-on as objects of desire for millions of fans and they still turn heads just as their designers intended. They make a much simpler, more practical ownership proposition than many European alternatives too.
But aren’t they out of reach? Not really. Allow us to show you this temptingly affordable example.
