Yahoo Autos Learn More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About the C5 Corvette
Your humble author was in middle school when the C5-generation Corvette dropped like an alien spaceship crash-landing on Earth. Out with the old, in with the new, new, new! I once botched together with my ham-dough fingers a Monogram model kit of a Corvette Grand Sport-Skill 2, thank you, because I had an attention span once-this obliterated every single memory of that. In the still-developing brain of a single-digit age, a then-new C5 Corvette spotted on the street deserved all the shrieking and shouting I threw at it.
If all Corvettes are revolutionary, then the C5 was certainly it. The debut of the brand-new aluminum-block LS engine couldn't have come wrapped in prettier bodywork. The C5 was shorter, meaner, more agile, more aerodynamic. It was a watershed moment, said Don Sherman in a tattered February 1997 issue of Popular Science that I read on the living room floor with a rapt attention usually reserved for medical school finals. With a double-spread cutaway, who could resist?
Relive the joy of the C5, simultaneously the first modern Corvette and one of the best-performing ones ever made. Still is. If you've got an hour to kill then you can do no worse than checking out the above 1990s time warp, which covers the entire production process at Bowling Green, Kentucky, the failed concepts, the engineering details, the pre-sinkhole National Corvette Museum, and an exquisite mustache.
Did you know that the C5 Corvette was the first example of the breed with parallel windshield wipers? Now you know.
