The deed is finally done!
After all this time I have finally bought a ZR-1.
The vehicle is currently in Michigan and has 33000 miles on it, the bodywork is almost flawless and so is the underneath. It has a custom exhaust and wheels, but comes with all the original parts (including the original 1991 tires!) and even has the original window sticker (original price $66000!)
The previous owners have really kept the car in amazingly good condition and a big thank you goes out to all of them.
Of course, the story is not quite that simple. It never is it seems 
– in this instance the car is in the US and I’m in Canada, so now I have to go through the importing process.
My first thought was that I would drive it back Continue reading
There’s a ZR-1 for sale on the registry site for $5000. Now, hold on just a second, before you go running off to get the number to call the seller, there’s something you should know. It’s been rolled.
There’s no engine or transmission. Most of the front and bodywork is gone and there could be some rear damage too, there also appears to be some damage to the top of the windshield too possibly.
Okay, so now it’s a junker, right? Why am I wasting your time with this?
Well, there are some real possibilities here.
First of all, the overall condition of the chassis and the passenger cell etc. looks in good condition. The parts that are damaged are mostly the parts that are standard to any C4 so plentiful and cheap.
So what you have here is one hell of a fantastic project potential.
First there’s the obvious scenario. Rebuild the car, find an LT-5 and transmission and drop it in. The problem with that idea is that LT-5s aren’t exactly hanging around on street corners waiting to be bought and when you can find them they’re expensive. Still allowing around $10k for the engine, $2k for the transmission and maybe another $6k for the rest of it still leaves you with a fairly good priced ZR-1.
Some other options spring to mind though. Let’s say you do find an LT-5, originality isn’t an issue here so how about mounting the ‘Heart of the Beast’ to an automatic gearbox? The mounting should be a fairly easy fabrication for anyone with a decent home workshop or could be farmed out to a good shop. I can hear the purists gasping in horror at the thought, but hell you’d have the only slush-box ZR-1 on the planet probably.
As I said an LT-5 is pretty hard to find and expensive. So how about dropping an LS-1 or LS-2 in there. Again this might be sacrilege to many, but in many ways the new C5 and C6 engines are the descendents of the mighty LT-5 (albeit a somewhat side branch of the family).
A standard LS-1 will give power levels approaching a pre-93 ZR-1 and with some fairly simple bolt-ons will surpass it, at least on a pure horsepower level, if not in terms of refinement and top end.
The newer engines are also very amenable to tuning; there is a bewildering array of power-adders and updates for these engines. What’s more they are plentiful and relatively cheap. And on top of that, like the LT-5, they’re a completely aluminium engine so the power to weight ratio is excellent.
The fabrication again shouldn’t be too hard. The LS series engines were tested in the C4 chassis while GM was doing early testing with ‘mules’ so should present few problems. The gearbox and instrumentation may need some work but hey we all like a challenge don’t we?
Lastly, how about this for an idea. Install a C5-R 427 or similar. This probably wouldn’t cost any more than trying to find a replacement LT-5 but the power levels would be fantastically insane. One thousand horsepower should be easily within reach with this kind of setup. Adding in super or turbo chargers would provide enough power to move a small planet
Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of rescuing a fallen warrior and breathing new life in to him, giving him the weapons he needs to rise again, that sounds very cool!
How many ‘vettes are there in your personal target group?
Thirty thousand? Fifty thousand?
GM have built around twenty to thirty thousand Corvettes most years of the car’s existence, so the target of ‘possibles’ should be quite high for any given year.
Or perhaps not.
Corvettes traditionally come with quite a lot of options, especially in the earlier years when some models had as many as four or five engine choices, gearbox options, rear-end ratios, suspensions etc.
This profligacy ended when the laws were changed to require all variants to be tested for safety, crash testing and fuel efficiency, which is why later models typically have less mechanical options. On top of these we have the various technology updates which on a ‘vette tend to be a yearly cycle as well as interior and exterior trim and things like performance brakes or suspension.
One Corvette owner I met told me that ‘all Corvettes are rare’ and indeed that’s true. Compared to a typical saloon or minivan twenty or thirty thousand vehicles isn’t many. He then went on in great detail how his car was rare because GM had changed supplier mid-year and his shade of blue was slightly different to the one that replaced it.
In engineering circles this sort of thing happens all the time and is called a manufacturing or engineering tolerance. It’s nothing special, it just means that nothing is truly perfect or consistent.
On that basis, every Corvette (and in fact every single manufactured item on the planet!) will be unique and infinitely valuable. If GM changes supplier for 10mm bolts during a year and you get one of the cars with the lesser suppliers bolts does that mean you have a rare or valuable ‘vette?
A feature in ‘Corvette Fever’ recently featured a car they celebrated as unique, purely because the owner ordered a bunch of options that weren’t really standard and the engineers at the factory threw the car together haphazardly, often not even bothering to make the various options work correctly. Poor workmanship does not a valuable Corvette make…
In fact, if producing poor quality vehicles was the key to success, GM, Ford et al. would be kicking Toyota and Nissan’s collective arses.. instead of suffering from their customers walking away them in droves.
A significant number of ‘vette owners vastly over-rate their cars value, at least judging by the asking prices seen, and many don’t even know what they own. I’ve seen numerous ‘T-roof’ C4s (there were none ever built), ZR-1s with automatic transmissions (again none were built) and a host of others that are rare by distiction of being only one of ten thousand built that year with a red exterior.
This for example, labelled as a ZR-1. The engine is clearly not an LT-5. It claims to be a 412ci engine, which might be true, but it isn’t a ZR-1. Dressing up an L-98 base-engined car like a tart’s handbag doesn’t make it a ZR-1 