From the July 2015 issue
A 1967 Corvette Sting Ray is our time machine for visiting the era when America and Car and Driver came of age. The 1960s marked the arrival of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Stones—not to mention modern birth control, space travel, and draft-card burning—so it’s no wonder this nation’s psyche was irrevocably twisted. C/D contributed to the chaos by penetrating the DMZ separating import worshippers from domestic-car enthusiasts. After a Pontiac Tempest GTO “beat” a Ferrari 250GTO in our March 1964 “comparison test,” the bar fights advanced to DEFCON 3.
Fifty years ago, GM was king. Accountants fudged prices to ensure that market share didn’t top 50 percent, thereby avoiding trustbusters, while GM’s designers and engineers created everything from $2000 Chevy Corvairs to $11,000 Cadillac Fleetwoods. The ’60s began with the General’s attempt to build a better Beetle in said Corvair, and the company gained momentum with turbochargers, aluminum-block V-8s, muscle cars, and a 7.7-liter front-drive Cadillac Eldorado untarnished by torque steer. Engineers and designers were free to dream from within GM’s breathtaking, Eero Saarinen–designed Tech Center in Warren, Michigan. With no import worries or fear that Chrysler or Ford might catch up, GM played intramural scrimmage among its six divisions.
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We cant say that Corvettes have gotten any prettier in the last 50 or so years, but they have become much faster. |
Today GM is recuperating nicely from bankruptcy. It ranks seventh on the Fortune 500 list, six slots below Walmart. Setting aside Sam’s house of Chinese-made recyclables, the apple of every consumer’s eye is, well, Apple, two slots above GM in the pecking order. Possibly as a result of subliminal mind control, Apple has succeeded GM as the purveyor of toys and tools essential to modern life. Apple might even enter the car business if its Titan project matures. We’ll fret over that later. Today, we’re staging one 1967 Corvette 427 and one 2015 Corvette Z06 on the Motor City’s main drag, Woodward Avenue, for the street race of the ages.
Corvettes thrived in the ’60s as America’s middle-finger salute to the Jaguar E-type, Mercedes SL, and Porsche 911. What Detroit V-8s lacked in camshafts, they made up for with exhaust cackle and more than enough power to rout uppity imports.
We picked the ’67 Sting Ray not only because it was the pride of the GM fleet in its day, but also because we had one handy. Twenty years ago, your author rescued this car from beater status and restored it to its current glory in the privacy of his garage.
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Left: Still uses pushrods. Right: That is not a road-salt storage facility; its GMs design dome in Warren, Michigan. |
Vette fans hold the so-called “midyear” models (1963–67, or C2) in high esteem because that was when Corvettes became world-class sports cars. Patron saint Zora Arkus-Duntov hoped for a rear-mounted transaxle as part of the heroic 1963 redesign. That dream was postponed for 34 years, but he was able to bless C2s with independent rear suspensions, big-block engines, disc brakes, and side exhaust pipes. The new-for-1963 Z06 option code expedited race prep with a 36-gallon fuel tank, a 360-hp fuel-injected small-block V-8, knockoff aluminum wheels, and a limited-slip differential.
The ’67 Corvette Sting Ray was basically a stand-in when the Shark-era third-generation Corvette suffered engineering and production delays. Caught unprepared for another year of the C2, GM styling left the ’67s minimally adorned because there wasn’t time to make fresh jewelry.
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The engines not original, but Sherman is. |
This 427 roadster left the St. Louis factory powered by the L71 three-carburetor, 435-hp V-8 but rolled out of its restoration bay in slightly altered form, largely because the original driveline had been sacrificed to the drag strip. Its rebirth brought aluminum cylinder heads (a $369 option in 1967) and a fresh 427 block. Without power-assisted steering or brakes, the aluminum cylinder heads’ 150-pound weight savings is hugely valuable. A factory high-rise intake manifold hosting a single Holley four-barrel carburetor fed by a cold-air-induction hood mimics the hottest Vettes of the day, the exotic 427 L88s (hence the tribute license plate). Only 20 of those factory racers were sold in 1967; originals command $3 million and up.
In the dozen Reader’s Choice polls Car and Driver conducted from 1964 through 1975, Corvettes won our Best All-Around Car or Best Value award 10 times. But, as with GM as a whole, the car fumbled through the ’70s and base-engine output dropped to an embarrassing 165 horsepower. Enthusiasm also flagged when Arkus-Duntov’s second-generation chassis remained largely unchanged for the C3, a 20-year life span. Storm clouds formed a third time in 1992, when funds to engineer a fifth-generation Corvette weren’t available through normal channels. To safeguard the sports car from extinction, Chevy general manager Jim Perkins had to shuffle $2.5 million from his marketing budget to sustain the Corvette engineering program.
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