2014 Chevrolet Corvette - The Brute: faster, more refined and sexy.

I first heard of the Corvette in the mid seventies when is saw a picture of a nice coupe version in a German car guide. I was in grade five when, together with my buddy Kristof, we decided to send a letter to the German publishers of the Auto Motor und Sport magazine begging them to send us a catalog. At least I think that’s what the letter begged for. We obtained a text typed in German from someone who swore the letter was legit, but we couldn't understand it.

It was communist Poland you see, and you couldn’t simply order stuff from West Germany. We couldn’t afford the few German Marks a catalogue would cost anyway, since it was equivalent of a couple of days wages in the wonderfully centralized Polish economy that was run by the Central Committee of the Polish United Worker’s Party with their ten-year-plans. Get ready for that kind of lifestyle here, my friends. The leftist big-government elites and their media “useful idiots” are working hard to bring the Socialist Paradise to Canada.

But I digress. Someone at Vereinigte Motor Verlage GmbH in Stuttgart was kind enough or felt sorry enough and sent us a couple of catalogues. I got the Motorrad Catalog and Kristof got the Auto Catalog. We were in automotive haven. Many long evenings passed while we savored every page of colour photographs of cars and motorcycles from all over the world.

At there was the Vette: a fantastically exotic (to us) looking machine. And at the bottom of the picture: Höchstgeschwindigkeit (nice German word for top speed): 270 km/h. How many km/h? Impossible! Those bloody Americans! I wanted that car badly. I dreamed about it and I thought about it all the time.

Of course when I came to Canada in 1982, the Vette was a sorry caricature of its former self. The most powerful version claimed 230 bhp and, although the car looked aggressive, it was slow, handled badly and it was poorly built.

The fourth generation car was a big improvement design wise, but the car was still underpowered and of poor quality. Later model years of the C4 and then newer C5 and C6 generations got progressively better, until the car was almost world-class and certainly the best performance bang for the money.

The main reason I liked it, despite the still relatively poor interior, was that it was such a wonderfully capable point-and-shoot machine. All you had to do was press the accelerator and hang on. The car would do the rest and smoke 99.9% of everything else out there with ease.

Well, the new 2014 car, which gets the Stingray name again, promises to be by far the best Vette ever and truly world class, with great design, excellent performance and fantastic looks. I want one again!

Autoweek: 2014 Chevrolet Corvette The Stingray