I am only 18 years old, and have never really been able to grasp what it was like when these awesome C3's first came out. To all you older vetters what was it like? What did you say when you saw the change from '67 to '68...amazed? confused? didn't care?.

It is hard for me to imagine what it was like, because I don't even know what it was like when they went from C3 to C4...and as for C4 to C5, I wasn't into vettes like I am now, so I didn't care less what it was like, all i knew was I loved the C3's.

When did the name shark stick? What did you think when they got rid of the led in gas? What about when they choked the engines with emissions? Went from chrome to plastic bumpers?

Im trying to understand what the world was like when these cars came out.

Thanks;

Daniel

Try to help a youngster understand the era in which his car was born!

 

Daniel - In my case, I was driving my '62 around one Sunday in March (the 17th) in 1968. General Motors/Corvette advertised in the Pittsburgh papers that they were going to have a display to include the '68 T-Top @ the Holiday Inn adjacent to the Pittsburgh get-off to the Pa. TurnPike (Monroeville). I had never seen a "live" T-Top, wanted to, so I boogied on over after dumping $3 worth of gas - probably 10 gallons, into the tank. I think it was the Corvette Club of Western Pa. co-hosting. They were promoting a "St. Pat's Econo-Run" where, for - I think - $3 entry fee, all entrants drove to Tony Tyke's Gulf Station, they filled the gas tank (DAYAM, and I had just filled mine...almost). Then everyone got on the "Orange Belt" - one of those circuitous routes around the city of Pgh. which was supposed to help you avoid traffic...but never worked. It ran out to the Greater Pgh AirPort, then circled back, whereupon they again re-filled your tank and then calculated "MPG". Attendees got a dash plaque...my first one EVER...which I promptly affixed to the perpendicular console that holds the clock & radio (below the dashboard). The plaque is STILL there (good adhesive), because I just went down to confirm the date. I also still have the newsletter that the club sent out to all entrants that listed the MPG's. Forum member "Motorman" was there & can confirm. Hope I didn't bore you :sleep: , but THAT'S what I remember about the '68 :flag
Cruz

 

When i was in ninth grade Corvette summer came out. Cool car; pretty bad movie. I didn't think much about Corvettes back then. I was really into Volkswagens and a Blazer that i was fixing up.
When i was in eleventh grade one of the senior girls started driving a white 75. Wow what a car. That was the first time i really noticed what a Corvette really was. That same year the home comming queen and her attendants rode on corvettes in the homecomming parade. Imagine how cool that was especially for a small town in Nevada. After that i knew i had to have a Corvette someday. In college i drove a 76 camaro that some friends and i built to autocross in. It was fast ,but not a Corvette. Actually it was faster than the stock vettes that ran, but like i said it wasn't a Corvette. I finally bought a 77 in 91 after i blew the engine in the Camaro. Having a vette was always something in the back of my mind since i was sixteen years old. I had to wait ten years to get one. When i did get one it had to be a c3 and it had to have a flat rear window. I think a lot of Corvette owners feel the same way. One day we noticed one and began a life long fascination.
I like the c4's i even thought about selling mine and buying one. After some serious thought i just couldn't part with my 77.
I don't think the love for the car had anything to do with what was going in the world at the time. It was just a feeling that maybe only a car guy could understand.

 

Between 1968 and 1976 I was in high school and college. That’s when my wrenching years started. I remember though going to Kenny Ross Chevrolet on the North side with my family in search of a suitable family sedan. Well inside the showroom I spotted what I thought was a British Racing Green Corvette. I think it was about 1965-1966. It was beautiful and the Corvette seed was firmly planted. The Vette was a BB with the cowl induction hood. From that point on I tried to scrounge every car magazine I could in search of knowledge and information.

During those years muscle cars ruled and many of my neighbors had Road Runners, 390-Mustangs and one guy had an AMX! ---and this was the poor inner city area!

Just when my interest in HP and the muscle cars, there was the ’73 oil embargo and gas prices sky rocketed. Starting in 1973 HP and torque seemed less important and the auto makers tried to make vehicles that got better mileage. Performance declined. All this and I was getting prepared to enter the work force in 1976 and purchase a new muscle car. But they were long gone. Replaced by pseudo muscle car which were shells of their early counterparts. I settled on a 1976 Pontiac Trans-Am 455 4sp. Just a few years earlier I coulda had a 455-SD for about the same money. Corvette's were hit too. The BB’s were gone and I thought were headed down the “luxury” car route. Fortunately the Corvette survived the late ‘70’s.

Anyway, there was always hoopla in the car magazine about the next generation Corvette. As far back as I can remember, the magazines were always looking for a mid-engine or rear engine Corvette.

In a way it was very much like the quote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”.



[Modified by 1970 Stingray, 4:53 AM 12/17/2001]

 

For a lot of people at first it was a "Love it or hate it" car. Then it kinda grew on you like the C5 when it first came out. I was just getting out of the air force so I ended up buying a well used '62 and drooled over the "sharks that I couldn't afford

 

I remember my first 'real' job, '66 that would allow me to spend 500 down and borrow 500 from bank for a used '60 vette for a grand even....
lost it in a wreck in '67 or so, and then jumped ship into Pontiacs, which were much faster actually, but thing is...I could get INSURANCE, screw the affordability, one wreck and just plain GETTING any insurance was a feat in and of itself.....
then cam along Ralph Nader and all his line of bullpoopie, I was in the Washington d.c. area at the time, and knew all the poopie about that man....
not that the liberal papers would ever print it.....
well anyway they started loading cars with airpumps, messed up timing, laws and threats and the underhoods started looking so complicated, I stayed away from them.....now a days it's all simple, it's a learning curve just like anything else.....
car price increases to cover all Nader's bullpoopie just made affordability to a young underpaid working guy totally out of the picture....during that period of time....let alone the allmighty INSURANCE.....

it wasn't untill I left the wash dc. area and went to Texas in '70 that I could afford a decent car, another much newer Pontiac, Texas --god bless their soul didn't require the allmighty INSURANCE for a license/ownership....
well guess what, I stayed that way for about 10 years, untill the system cleared itself out of all that points crap and such.....then I snuck back in under the radar, and been ok since then.....

NOW a days, the MADD groups with this national license clearing bullpoopie have all the kids totally screwed from the git go....ONE damn ticket and it's over.....INSURANCE requirements being what they are, hell, I know personally of people here in Florida getting raped for 300-400/MONTH on premiums.....rediculous.....hell, even my WIFE was paying over 800/year for just a silly Escort for christsakes.....a 4 cyl woos mobile commuter car....
needless to say I have all 3 cars covered for that much now.....just fought like a bastard to get it, that's all....

but back to the cars themselves, by the time the '73 came out , they were now loaded with that EGR crap, choking off last of performance, and now requiring cam and induction changes, carb rejetting and retuning totally to get the damn things to run....the way they did in '67,....but by '73 the compression was down to 7.x across the boards....and unleaded made it's appearance.....those catastrophic converters came out in '75, and that really killed any chances of performance increases being cheap and or easy....it took the advent of chips/electronics/computers to make performance available again.....
not only that, but most car companies were putting all resources into engine and emissions, and not so much into body/assembly details...so assembly/fittment of final product sucked all through the 70's....I mean REALLY sucked.....corvettes included.....and GM assembly was never all that great anyway to start with....

so in total, I looked at like paying super high prices for a noisey, ill fitting under performing piece of crap was not good sense, so I staved off the inevitable by buying used cars and hotrodding....wasn't untill the advent of emission testing, I started buying new cars....then ending up with my '87 vette which unfortunately was a very ill advised purchase....it was without a doubt the most expensive car, and the worst piece of crap I ever drove...reliability was ZILCH....ZERO, must have fixed that car for EVERY damn fault ever even MENTIONED on this forum...
But I wanted a vette, SO I bought my '72 about 6 years ago, and slowly decided what to do with it....hotrod style,...no silly-assed governemnt to worry about inspections and all.....

GENE

 

For me it happened in 1973. I was in high school and working at a SOHIO Station near Dayton ohio. I was just starting to get the wrenching bug. One day a guy pulled in with an orange 68. First time I had seen one up close. He even let me put the gas in it. That was it. The thought of having a "shark" never really left my mind. But then, before I could aford one....joined the Navy....got married...kids...the whole nine yards. And the wife...(ex wife now) had ZERO interest in cars at all..let alone Vette. Well...kept on waiting and finally in 1997 I bought my first one...a bright red 77 (of course against the wishes of that same wife). I was in love...(with the car...HAHA) . But eventually....the pressures from inside the house made me sell it. Wasnt too much longer that I got rid of that wife anyway. About the time I was getting ready to retire from the Navy....met a great lady from up north (I was in Corpus Christi TX at the time). We have been together ever since. And she LOVES Vettes!! Matter of fact....she just bought me my second 77 for my birthday!! What a lady! We will pick it up most likely sometime this week. She cant wait to take a couple pics for me to post. This one is white with black leather. I cant wait.

The unleaded gas thing and the "gas wars" all happened while I was at that SOHIO station. I remember us running out of gas often....and then when we got some...standing outside all day on a very cold sunday in Janurary for 8 straight hours pumping gas cuz no one else had any. Ill never forget how the gas going through the pump would warm the handle.

Anyway...thats my story...and Im stickin to it!

Have a great day. Ron

 

Daniel,
I was driving a 67 corvette that was only 5 months old when the 68 vette came out. I knew the new body style was coming out when I purchased my 67, but I was hot to have a new vette and could not wait. I was also having trouble with my 66GTO and need to get rid of it. When all the reports of problems with the new vette came out I was glad I bought the 67.
Hope this gives you some perpective of the good old days.
Ed

 

Well let's see, I was concieved in or on the hood of a 1971 Vette, at least my dad has told me that joke since I was old enough to remember. I wasn't old enough to drive one back then, but I always thought they were the coolest cars on the road in the late 70's. I kind of lost track of my passion for Vettes through the 80's and most of the 90's. In 95 I bought a Geo Metro and after 3 years of crawling around in that thing I was ready for speed :cool: . I drove up to Jacksonville, picked out the only C3 on the lot, and haven't regreted it since.


[Modified by Warp70, 3:36 PM 12/17/2001]

 

I was eight years old when they came out and I thought they looked like a rocket ship! :eek: A big step forward from those old designs! (an 8yr. old thinking!)


[Modified by Brian, 3:53 PM 12/17/2001]

 

Warp, how did they fit in the engine compartment??? :eek:

I was completely car crazy in the late 60s early 70s. As factory performance declined in the late 70s so did my interest.

I think the styling change from 67 to 68 was similar to the styling change from 96 to 97. In both cases went from a clean understated line to a wavy highly stylized body that reminded me of a Ferrari (both times).

unleaded gas? :sleep:

Lots of kids had fast cars in my high school. some were fairly expensive. No vettes, not one. Nobody could afford the insurance. MJ

 

I got my driver's licence in 1973 (age 16) and the car bug began in earnest. First car a Datsun 510, soon followed by a '67 Galaxie convert., then the muscle car....'69 Firebird Conv 350HO 4spd. Then custom vans...the big thing then....then married life, kids etc....cars took a backseat.

What I remember though was how in the mid 70's, all new cars were choked with pollution controls, lousy performance, mileage and not great styling. Not talking Vette's here, but you regular full and mid size GM, Chrysler, Ford products. If you wanted performance, you had to buy something from about '71 or earlier. Nice to see the later C3's being improved to have equal or better performance to the early C3's (where pollution laws allow this).

Today, I have the '68 because that was my favourite era of cars. The '65 to '70 era is my favourite. Today though, the equivalent new model (z06 for example) does everything better (faster, safer, handling, you name it..), but for me nothing matches the brutish appeal of a late 60's non power assisted, V8 performance car. For me, driving the Vette is like reliving my late teenage/early twenties all over again!