Corvette Grand Sport Color Scheme Takes C7 From Gorgeous to Garish
Someone has to say it. The C7 Corvette Grand Sport looks atrocious. Yes, this is going to be a rant on how Chevrolet turned the newest Corvette into a four-wheeled flamboyant clown car. If you buy a Grand Sport, yes, you will have a powerful supercar, but you’ll look ridiculous driving it.
Let me interject briefly and say I love Corvettes. The C7 Corvette Grand Sport is arguably the best Corvette you can buy right now. The base Stingray is great, but compared with the Z06, it’s just a fair-weather weekend cruiser. The Z06 itself is a religious experience, that is until you take it to a track on a day that’s hotter than 86 degrees, then it begins to melt and becomes as useful as a bag of rocks.
The new Grand Sport takes some of the best traits from both the Stingray and the Z06, and unifies them into one “just right” package. But only from an engineering perspective. That’s likely where the executives spent all their time and money. That’s great and all, but whoever chose the colors for the car ruined all that awesomeness. It is as though someone handed a box of crayons to a child, and mandated them to use the colors no one ever uses together. It’s as if something went terribly wrong in the genetic coding of two beautiful people, and the child they spawned turned out to be the ugliest child the planet has ever seen.
What’s wrong with the design you might ask? For starters, there’s too much color going on in some of these colorways. It’s like Liberace vomited America all over one, and a lemon had sex with a stick of licorice in the other. The only somewhat acceptable variant is the smoke gray with those baby-blue stripes … but then I saw the dashboard was baby blue! What the ever-loving hell? Baby blue is a calming color! When I have 460 horsepower available at the press of my right foot, I want satan’s own fury running through my blood, not the therapeutic calming color of a tropical waterfall.
I might be too harsh in my opinion, so I asked my successful designer fashionista girlfriend to chime in. Not only did I want the unadulterated expertise of someone who designs and makes things for a living, but I wanted a discerning female perspective. Here was her response. I did not let her read anything I wrote. I only showed her the photos of the car:
What would you think if I pulled up in one of these cars?
“I like the body design, but the color scheme is poorly balanced. Sadly, it doesn’t look like an expensive car. It looks like a cheap Hot Wheel that my nephew would play with.”
What if I told you this car costs around $67k?
“Wow, that’s it? How much more would it cost to paint the car something that would make me respect it out on the road?”
How do you like those color schemes?
“The red and black one is the only one I find to be decent. The yellow one is too happy, and I don’t even want to think about the red, white and blue one anymore. It’s too much. I feel like you might be trying to compensate for something.”
Ouch. Thanks, babe.
So Chevy is offering up to 10 color variations for the C7 Corvette Grand Sport, and the option to customize your ride. This could be a godsend so you can hopefully fix Chevy’s mistakes, or if you have even less taste than their designers, you can make an even bigger mistake. Expect to see some heinous C7 Grand Sports out on the road soon, but don’t worry: the guy or gal driving one won’t be in your field of vision for too long because he or she will be moving faster than everyone else.
Rant over. For a full and excellent review on how good this car really is, head over to Jalopnik to read what Jeff Glucker had to say after driving it hard and fast in Atlanta.