MY GENERATION
The King Is Dead… Long Live the Kingby Rick Tavel© 1-3-2012 All rights reserved. Do not use without expressed written consent.
Unlike most of Detroit’s models, which often were the recipients of significant styling changes from year to year, the Corvette annual tweaks were subtle and to most, other than real “Vetters”, almost imperceptible. So, even the smallest changes to the Corvette were debated by its fans. After all, the King was the King, so any change had to be warranted and improve the car’s looks. Sometimes even the most insignificant change would either excite or incite us. If we look at the C2 as an example from 1963 through 1967 the major body styling went unchanged other than minor styling modifications. One modification Chevrolet made on the 1966 Corvette was changing the inside rear light on each side to a clear lens to accommodate the backup lights,
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I remember a lively discussion one September, Saturday
morning at Ed Parks Barber Shop, among those waiting for haircuts, debating the
styling of the newly introduced 1963 Corvette Sting Ray. Mr. Parks, the barber, along with two other
men were convinced that the new styling would surely spell the end for the
sports car (sound familiar?), it was just too radical. Keep in mind the only 1963 Corvette that Ed
and his two friends had seen was on “Route 66”, the TV series, and in Corvette
advertisements. Two college guys waiting
their turns in the chair disagreed with Ed and the others. One of the two, his name was Mark, had
actually seen a real Sting Ray. He found
it in a dealership in Cincinnati, Superior Chevrolet if I recall
correctly. I had
considered “thumbing” a ride to a dealer just so I could
memorize every line and detail of the new car, but I couldn’t find one that had
a car close enough to where I lived.
Okay so I was still kind of a wimp!
So I hung on Mark’s every word as he described the Sebring silver coupe
sitting in the showroom. I was quick to
add my support of his opinion, it was the most beautiful automobile creation I
had ever seen, and I was just as quickly ignored by my barber and his
friends. To support his opinion, Mark
added that the new car was such a success there was a three to four month wait
for a new one. It cost over $4000. In response the barber added that it was
“foolish” to spend that kind of money on an impractical car “like that” when
for a few hundred less you could buy “a real car, a fully loaded Merc Monterey
Convertible”. A Mercury for God’s sake,
how could anyone even refer to a Mercury in the same sentence with a Corvette,
I thought!
Mark’s friend, who currently drove a tired five year old
1957 Corvette and boasted he was just two “points” away from losing his
license, informed the small shop that he was saving up half the cost of a new
Sting Ray and along with his trade-in could afford to finance the thousand
dollar balance. I could see the
“disapproval” in the older men’s eyes, but his plan seemed to make perfect
sense to me.
There were only two things resolved in Ed Park’s barber shop
that day, neither of them about the Corvette.
One was the unanimous opinion that our high school football team was
destined to win another, in their long line, of state championships and the
second thing resolved that day was when I got to high school I wasn’t going to
let Ed “the barber” touch my hair again.
By the time we got around to the Corvette’s next generation
and launch it was a year filled with political and social events which could
easily cast a foreboding shadow on the new C3’s introduction. Couple those events with the competition from
inside the auto industry and the coronation of the new King appeared to be
vulnerable. As was the custom, the 1968
model year cars were introduced in the fall of 1967, a year steeped in anger
and protest. Just two months prior to
the release of the C3,
Detroit was torn apart by the angry summer riots which had
set many of the major cities in the United States ablaze in protest over
discrimination and lack of jobs. The
violent summer of 1967 seemed to overshadow everything else, everything except
the escalating Viet Nam war, the anti-war protests, and most of all, the tragic
lost lives of over 15,000 American soldiers.
Political and social controversies, however, were not the
only things with which the launch of the new generation of Corvette had to
compete. The auto industry itself had
even threatened a possible new model delay due to the almost impossible task of
dealing with the Federal government’s safety and Smog standards. But an even greater threat to a successful
unveiling, unlike the 1962 introduction of the C2, the new C3 had to compete
with the new wave of “specialty” (re: pony)
and muscle cars. In 1962 the new
Corvette C3 had most of the American performance market to itself. But 1964 saw the introduction of the hugely
popular Ford® Mustang, as well as the performance based and rebadged Pontiac
Tempest turned GTO. David E. Davis,
editor of Car & Driver® magazine,
validated the entire muscle car movement when he published an article in March
of 1964 claiming the Pontiac GTO was faster than the Ferrari with the same
name. Then Davis added insult to injury to Ferrari fans when he stated that
Ferrari never built enough GTOs to earn the name! The muscle car and “specialty” car market
exploded so by the time the C3 was introduced in the fall of 1967 the market
was flooded with performance cars of every type. There were even some intruders into the
two-seat sports car market. The Shelby
Cobra the only other true American “sports car” ceased production in the US in
1967, the same year the Corvette C3 was unveiled, but American Motors jumped in
to the two-seat sports car market with the introduction of the AMX. If we look at the new car specialty/performance
market we find there were no less than fifteen competitors to the Corvette from
GM, Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors.
GM, who at that time controlled over 50% of the domestic market and was
bigger than the rest of the US automakers combined, fielded six performance
competitors to its only sports car: Camaro, Firebird, SS396, GTO, 442 and the
GS400.
The automobile journalists praised the new body style for the ability to mount wider tires which the C2’s wheel housings wouldn’t allow. They also found the removable front part of the roof, in two sections, to be innovative and compared it to a Porsche® Targa except that “the Corvette’s is in two sections separated by a center bar.” The term “T Tops” had yet to evolve.
Road & Track®, Car
& Driver®, Hot Rod®, and Motor
Trend®, I was pretty convinced what I would see at the dealership. The four of us piled in the car to make the
trip across the Ohio river to see the car. Don,
the most mechanical and technically adept of the group, talked most of the way
about the engines being offered. They
were carried over from the 1967 model so he had plenty of time to research
them. I have to admit, he did know
something about engines and performance.
I mean the three of us knew a little about engines, but Don knew more, much more and even more
importantly, unlike my other two friends, he understood how things worked. He owned a 1963 Oldsmobile “Jetfire” that had
a turbocharged V8 that produced over 200 HP and Don continually “worked on” the
car himself to keep it running.
Something my other two friends were incapable of doing.
The new Corvette turned out to be every bit as beautiful as anticipated. Everything but the color, Corvette Bronze they called it. Our general consensus of the color was a more descriptive and appropriate term would have been “babysh*t brown”. But even that term could not diminish the car and its lines. It was all we expected and actually the “teaser” renditions had been over exaggerated, the actual car’s lines were cleaner, more in proportion. Unfortunately the car was fitted with a 427/390 automatic, so we didn’t get to see either the three deuce 427 or the L88, but that didn’t matter, it wasn’t the car we would have ordered but the lines of the car, the styling was fabulous. It looked fast just sitting there. In addition the removable rood on the coupe eliminated the need to order a convertible. The new C3 did not disappoint, it was everything and more that a seventeen year old could ever want to drive!