America’s sports car 1984–1985

The Chevrolet Corvette rolled out of Flint, Michigan in 1953 and has never stopped—eight generations, no domestic rivals left standing. It nearly didn't happen. Chevrolet was bleeding market share, and brand manager Thomas Keating saw a sports car as the only remedy. The answer was fiberglass over a 3.9-liter straight-six, two-speed automatic— America's answer to the lean British roadsters of the postwar years. It debuted at GM's 1953 Motorama in Waldorf-Astoria, made it to production, and promptly sold almost none of its 300 hand-assembled units. A quiet, uncertain beginning for what would become America's sports car. 1984–1985: C4 for '84Chevrolet skips model year 1983 and releases the fourth-generation Corvette as a 1984 model. The sports car is redesigned from the ground up, gaining additional ground clearance while achieving a lower center of gravity. A 205-hp 350-cubic-inch V-8 is the only engine offered, paired with either a four-speed automatic transmission or Chevrolet's four-plus-three manual gearbox, the latter offering an available overdrive for gears two, three, and four. The automatic variant hustles the low-slung coupe to 60 mph in 6.7 seconds and through the quarter mile in 15.1 seconds at 91 mph. Despite our preference for manual transmissions, we deemed the self-shifting gearbox "quite a capable tool for generating performance statistics."