If you go to the Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, KY, you can see what I think of as The Luckiest Corvette.

GM built just forty-three 1983 Corvettes, or so the story goes. When the car couldn’t meet new California emisssions, the production was halted until the issue was fixed, and the decision was then made to call all the vehicles built after the restart 1984 Corvettes. Supposedly only one 1983 Corvette survived, and it was displayed for years in the main rotunda at the Corvette Museum. It was moved from the rotunda shortly before the infamous “sinkhole incident” and thus escaped total destruction again.

If you are looking for a lottery number, you should try that car’s VIN.

The arrival of the 1983, er, 1984 Corvette marked a turning point in the history of the marque. From 1953 to 1982, Corvettes were primarily about style, not speed. Sure, there was the occasional “fuelie”, Grand Sport, or big-block exception to the rule, but a major percentage of all the Corvettes built in that thirty-year period had automatic transmissions and under two hundred horsepower. None of them could handle like the European competition and by the late Seventies the car was kind of a rolling parody of itself. (Full disclosure: if I had more garage space I’d use some of it for a spoilers-and-bubbleback ’82 Collectors’ Edition.)

That was the first half of the Corvette story. The second half was written with a steel-toed boot right on the faces of everything from the Nissan Z to the Porsche 911 to the Ferrari 348. Most young enthusiasts have never lived in an era where the Corvette was not the performance-per-dollar champion. Most young enthusiasts have never lived in an era where a Jaguar convertible or base-model 911 could outrun a Corvette. From SCCA National Solo to the 24 Hours of LeMans, Corvette is now respected worldwide for performance.

The new Stingray continues the tradition and now, with the Performance Data Recorder, it adds driver performance to the list of things it does better than the competition. Check out my story on the PDR, complete with a 1:40 lap I took on a damp Shenandoah track with the father of a very pretty young trackside photographer as my somewhat discombobulated passenger.