You guys know I am always keeping my eyes peeled for deals, the latest I grabbed was this 'little red Corvette'. It's an 85, so the first year of the L98 with TPI (tuned port injection), no crossfire injection here. This one has 188K on it, I haven't run all the RPOs yet, but it does have the (fairly desirable) Z51 suspension and the (less desirable) automatic. Beyond that, seems like a fairly typical C4. Not at all a car I was seeking out, but I have a hard time passing up on a good deal.
From what I can tell it's had one respray in the original GM bright red, they did a decent job and the paint still shines decently, with some love it'll really pop. I am a sucker for red interiors, so I dig the red on red. The seats are in shockingly good condition, but the carpet and the rest of the interior, in typical C4 fashion, is pretty roached. I suspect though that a good detailing and maybe some red carpet dye (any recos!?) will go a long way here.
It runs and drives very well....I debated driving it the 40km home, but with impeding rain I decided against it. I did put maybe 10km on it circling around the neighborhood and it's really tight. Steering and suspension feels really sharp, the old L98 runs smooth, idles great, and pulls a lot harder than you'd expect for a 35 year old Vette. Even the transmission still shifts nice.
The majority of what it needs is cosmetic, lots of cleaning, detailing, fixing up interior trim, stuff like that. It does have a couple of issues I need to resolve. The first being that the digital dash is intermittent, while driving it toggles between being really faint an unusable and then suddenly it'll be fine. The blower motor is non-op, and someone cut off the mufflers and just ran a couple of pipes to some incorrect (and ugly) rear tips. It's unbearably loud...and I feel highly conspicuous driving around in a bright red vette with this much noise coming out of it.
All I did today was get it home, pulled the digital dash cluster out of it, pulled the headliner board (need recovering) off the targa top and gave it a quick vacuum. I'd like to get the dash thing resolved soon, but other than that I'll back burner this until the MGA is done; I've also got a couple spring house projects that'll need to get done ahead of this.
OK, honestly, who got the Prince reference and knew what I bought before opening the thread??
I realized I neglected to take any engine bay photos....sorry. Next time I am playing with it I will.
