What's the rarest Corvette to ever roll off the assembly line? Or the baddest of the bad factory-available performers? An L88? Nah, there were 216 documented examples built and sold during 1967-69. A '63 Z06? Nope, not with 199 of them in that one glorious year. How about a big-tank Z06? Sorry, those are still relatively commonplace, with 63 being factory-documented. The factory-built Corvette Challenge race cars for 1988 and 1989 are almost dime-a-dozen, with 116 of them assembled at Bowling Green.
If you want really rare, look back to 1969 for the ultimate in rare and radical, factory-built Corvettes-the incredible ZL1. Two-that's right. Two Corvettes were ordered, built, and sold through Chevrolet dealerships with this ultimate rat motor-an all-aluminum (block and cylinder heads!) version of the already fearsome L88 big-block. There was also a handful (three dozen or so) '69 Camaros ordered and sold with the ZL1, primarily for NHRA drag racing. That was it, except for a couple hundred ZL1 engines that were sold to racing teams. ZL1-derived engines powered the incredibly dominant McLarens in the old Can Am series in the late '60s and early '70s, and they propelled nearly every Greenwood wide-body Corvette that competed in the IMSA series from '74 into the early '80s.
Then, a few years ago, Winters, the Ohio foundry that cast every one of the relative handful of ZL1 blocks, stumbled onto the original tooling amongst a batch of obsolete tools that were being cleared out. To make a long story short (after all, we did an article, "Born Again Big-Block," about this happy happenstance in the Sept. '01 issue), GM Performance Parts now sells brand-new ZL1 blocks, using the original tooling and incorporating some strategic upgrades to make them even stronger than the originals.
Around this same time, Kurt Sikora, an Elgin, Illinois, Corvette enthusiast, came across the sorry remains of what had once been a '69 coupe. Its owner had stripped it apart for restoration years before, then left it outdoors to the mercy of the elements. There was a bare frame, an unsupported body shell, and many five-gallon buckets filled with '69 Corvette parts that had been stored inside a leaky shed. To make matters worse, said buckets had been left open and every one of them was filled with water-rendering the precious parts into rusty junk. The condition of the derelict was such that, by rational standards, it couldn't even be considered a parts car. But...
Kurt really, really likes metal-bumper sharks. He'd already performed a full restoration on a '70 LT1 Stingray, so he had a good idea of what would be necessary to raise this hulk back from the nearly dead. Of the five model years of chrome-bumper sharks, his personal favorites were the '69s. The fact that the car was missing its engine and transmission simply meant that he could get innovative, rather than feeling limited to a numbers-matching restoration. And, with a total investment of $1,300, if the poor old Vette proved to be too far gone to save, he wouldn't be throwing away that much money.