My undisputed all-time absolute favourite film ever of all time is a list so long that I ran out of gigabytes trying to write it. Same for songs really, how can anything ever be ‘better’ than Layla? Or, While my guitar gently weeps? Smells like Teen Spirit? Jolene??? Someone like me? Suffragette City? (Etc, etc, etc…) They all push different buttons. Or the same buttons in different ways. I’m not doctor. So I can’t say.

But my favourite car of all time is so much easier. It is this. A 1960 Chevy Corvette. Yes, a little red one, as Prince noted. And yes, the Ferrari this or the Porsche that handles better (probably difficult to ever find anything which handled worse than early American ‘muscle’ cars) or shifted smoother or had triple overhead dangly things which protected drivers from coronavirus but I don’t give a shit. It’s just the prettiest car ever to leave any production line anywhere. Ok, if it was powered by a Nissan Micra engine I might possibly reconsider. But it wasn’t. It had a massive monster engine, as only the Americans can produce.

Massive and monster engines were always needed there because, as anyone who has ever rented a car in the States knows, anything with a ‘normal’ type engine, the sort of engine that makes every car in Europe seem perfectly adequate if not downright perky, will not pull an American vehicle up any hill without unloading baggage and a few passengers first. They just have a brilliant knack of making massive engines with outstandingly minimal performance. “Oh yeah, the 6 litre supercharged V8 will get you to Walmart, long as you don’t buy too much, but if you want to get there and back comfortably you really should look to the 9 litre V16…”

So ‘my’ Corvette came with a ‘mere’ 289 (4.5 litre) V8 engine. With loads of horse power. But the horses were all a bit lame. So the conversion factor has to be applied to account for American horses being so ineffectual compared with Euro ones.

Interestingly, they made bigger engine options from 1959 but didn’t bother improving the brakes til 1960. Hence why I want that one. Not what you call ‘planning’. Conversely, its the fun way. Make the engines bigger, produce a few thousand, then realise (as the death toll increases) that probably the old brakes (taken from a pushbike) were struggling to halt one ton of metal traveling at 120 miles per.

Brakes, engines, performance, horses, phah! Just look at the thing. A testament to chrome, curves and beauty. They didn’t invent ‘wind resistance’ and ‘uplift’ til 1972 so neither were problems the design team needed concern their little heads with.

It’s so gorgeous it deserves a gorgeous driver. Just sayin’. With my birthday not far away, n that…

Happy… happy… happy… Days

A xxxx