With my wife's 2004 Mitsubishi Eclipse on life support, we spent this past Saturday car shopping. That's somewhat ironic given what a car wonk I am, you'd think I'd live for the opportunity. Nope. I'd rather be at the dentist. As luck would have it, one of the places we went to kick the tires on an old Lexus had this 1981 Corvette for sale.
It's only been about six-months since we said goodbye to our '77 Corvette and while we're very happy with our 1991 Corvette convertible I replaced it with, I have a soft spot for the 1980-1982 Corvettes. It's nothing nostalgic. When I was in high school, I was sick of these things and couldn't wait for the long-rumored all-new Corvette they had been teasing for years to come out. My appreciation has grown over the years and is more like waking up one day and realizing the girl next door was the prettiest girl in town. The prettiest girl in town who will drive you drink but nonetheless, the prettiest girl in town.
While 1970-1972 Corvettes are my favorites of the "C3's", I love what they did to update the front and rear facias for 1980, that, in my opinion, pulled together the look of the glass fastback they added in 1978. The '78 and '79's have an unfinished aesthetic I've never been fond of.
In addition to a 238-pound weight reduction for 1980, the rear suspension was updated with a much better design. It didn't make the cars perform like a Porsche 928, the performance benchmark for fourth-generation Corvettes that finally came out in 1984, but it reduced the sensation when you're driving that the front and rear ends had different agendas.
For 1981, engineers dropped the floor pan lower on the driver's side so the rack and motor for a power-adjustable driver's seat could fit. This enabled drivers to sit higher reducing fatigue since prior, the seat bottom sat too close to the floor of the car. These buckets became standard in 1979 replacing the buckets that dated back to 1968 that had all of the support of a concrete park bench.
Engines on the '81's were limited to a 190-horsepower, two-bolt main, 350 cubic-inch V-8. Contemporary road tests clocked the cars zero-to-sixty in 8.1-seconds making them the fastest accelerating cars made in the United States that year. Note the lack of a belt on the AC compressor.
Asking price for this 72,000-mile memory machine that appears to be in nice shape? $18,000. Yikes. Seems like all the money in the world for a third-generation Corvette that was made after 1973, especially one with busted air conditioning. I didn't waste their time or mine taking it for a spin, we passed on the Lexus too.
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