Road Test
From the October 1977 Issue of Car and Driver
TESTED
Herewith we again present the Corvette, which might be described as the Jackie Onassis of automobiles. Like the former first-lady-heiress-Jet-Set-Juliet, America's fiberglass sweetheart remains a subject of perpetual intrigue and fascination for the vox populi regardless of its age or impact on the larger scheme of things.
Moreover, Jackie O. and the Corvette have a larger-than-life quality about them, and regardless of their publicly demonstrated capabilities, we the people have invested them with a panache that defies empirical evidence. They are growing old together, these two media-ripened cult objects, but they persist in their ability to attract attention. Although in her forties and far beyond the gossamer glories of Camelot, Jackie is still newsstand dynamite in the movie mags and the gossip rags. The Corvette, as you may have noticed, is 25 this year, but its name and its radically planed shape retain unparalleled sales magic in the automotive press. The presentation of a Corvette on the cover of a magazine like this — especially if it is accompanied by a headline trumpeting "Exclusive! The Secret New 1984 Corvette!" produces irresistible Pavlovian responses among even slightly automotive readers, much as their counterpart, who read Modern Screen, react to nuggets like "Jackie O.'s Secret Affair!" (This of course leads one to speculate that perhaps the single, super-boffo cover blurb of all time might be "Exclusive! Jackie O.'s Secret New Corvette!" But that is a subject for another time.)
For the past few seasons, we of the automotive press have been faced with an unpleasant contradiction. It was this: Our beloved Corvette was getting old, fat and slow, and while the charisma persisted, the harsh truth was that as with Jackie, the best days were trailing off into dim memory. We pressed on, however, groping for superlatives as the old brawler's weight bulged perilously near two tons and its emissions-constricted horsepower sagged toward numbers once reserved for Japanese four-door sedans.
Thankfully, that all seems to have passed. New illuminations of knowledge have descended upon Detroit's engineering laboratories, permitting fresh lodes of horsepower to be extracted from clean-burning, no-lead-fueled engines, which means that the new 1978 Corvette comes to the showrooms with as much as 220 hp available from the optional L-82 350-cubic inch powerplant. (A respectable 185-hp — up five hp from 1977 — is packed into the base L-48 engine.)
In fact, after a number of recent Corvette editions that prompted us to mourn the steady decline of both performance and quality in this once-proud marque, we can happy report the twenty-fifth example of the Corvette is much improved across the board. Not only will it run faster now — the L-82 version with four-speed is certainly the fastest American production car, while the base L-48 automatic (0-60: 7.8 seconds, top speed: 123 mph) is no slouch — but general driveability and road manners are of a high order as well. The performance increase comes from two basic sources: a new, "dual-snorkel" air intake-air cleaner that supplies increased volumes of cool air to the engine and is worth about eight hp, and an improved, low-restriction dual exhaust system (with single catalytic muffler) that adds about five hp. An aluminum intake manifold also has been added, which produces some benefits in weight reduction but not in outright horsepower.
