Buying a Corvette is hard work. At least it is if you're as picky as I am. The notion of buying another project car had been percolating in my head for nearly a year before I decided the time was right to act. But the time between making the decision and actually pulling the trigger was filled with enough research and hand-wringing to qualify as a federally funded project.
The purchase of a C6 wasn't a foregone conclusion. I briefly entertained thoughts of a traditional musclecar. I looked at a couple of big-block '65 Impala Super Sports, some Turbo Regals, and even a Buick Gran Sport, but none felt quite right. Having been immersed in the LS1 world since its inception in the '90s, straying from the flock just seemed unnatural. While the thought of going retro was very appealing, the draw of returning to Corvette ownership proved too strong.
Having decided to purchase another Corvette, I was faced with choosing between a C5 and a C6. This may have been the hardest thing to decide, and I debated it for several months. I previously owned an '01 Z06, which I adored. The fixed-roof coupes will always be highly desirable to me, so the temptation was to save a little money and indulge my nostalgia with another C5 Z. The problem was that, in my eyes, the C5 has gotten a bit long in the tooth. The soft lines are no longer in vogue, and I never warmed up to its steatopygous rear aspect. The C6, on the other hand, speaks to me, though it wasn't always so.
Like many enthusiasts, my heart sank when I first saw photos of the newly redesigned '05 Corvette. Generally speaking, I am in favor of sharp style lines and edgy design. I dug the exposed headlights and the return to round taillights, but the longer wheelbase and short overhangs looked disproportionate to me. I dismissed the C6 without further thought since I wasn't in the market for a car at the time.
Fast-forward to autumn 2006: Fate placed me at the local Chevy dealer, as someone had absconded with my daily driver Silverado SS. While doing the paperwork on its humdrum replacement, a menacing figure caught my eye. There, parked dead center on the showroom floor, sat a black '06 Z51 coupe. Though suffering the indignity of greasy paw marks up and down its flanks, nose-printed windows, and even a water ring from some fool's can of Diet Dr. Pepper, its presence was immense. The seed was planted.
The Hunt
Once I settled on a sixth-gen, it was time to decide whether to buy new or used. This was actually pretty easy for me, since one look at the online classifieds in various forums showed that C6s, like most cars, were taking a huge depreciation hit in their first year or two. Screw that, I thought, let some other chump take that beating. Plus, with winter blowing in, there were lots of motivated sellers out there who didn't want to be making payments on a car they couldn't drive due to snow and ice (such nuisances are not much of a problem in the high desert of West Texas where I live).
With that, the hunt was on. I scoured the Internet for every Corvette-classifieds site I could find. My Firefox bookmarks list is still full of sites I checked daily-many of them several times per day-for the right car. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I knew I was close to hitting pay dirt. I had three finalists-two in Dallas and one in the San Francisco Bay area.
The two Texas cars were my preferred color, while the California car was my second choice. So, I flew to Dallas only to find out the seller of the car I intended to purchase (a dealer) had embellished (read: "lied through his teeth in") his description of the car's condition. I was so angry I briefly considered grabbing a cab back to Love Field and heading home.
I'm glad I didn't. It turns out the owner of the second car was just a few minutes away, and he was happy to come to me for a show-and-tell. In the end, my "second choice" was optioned more to my liking and in far better condition, even though it had a few more miles. We made the deal on the spot, and I pointed the car west. The 600-mile drive home was largely uneventful, save for one encounter with the Texas Highway Patrol. Yes, I was stopped for going 76 in a 70. I'm such a scofflaw.
The Car
So, what did I buy? The car is an '05 Daytona Sunset Orange Metallic Z51 coupe. DSOM was my first color choice, so I was really pleased to find one equipped precisely the way I wanted. It is a six-speed with option package 1SA, which makes it pretty rare, as the vast majority of '05s were burdened with high-lux 1SB packages. I didn't particularly want such nonperformance items as a transparent roof panel, XM radio, navigation, or heated seats, so this was obviously the better choice. My Z51/1SA car has all the stuff I need, nothing I don't. If I wanted superfluous accoutrements, I would have bought an Escalade.