As a common theme, the ‘68 “Little Red Corvette” was one I hadn’t even thought about “needing”, but it ended up as part of the herd, anyway.
When I was in New Braunfels, TX looking at the ‘69 Trans Am convertible clone, my soon-to-be wife said, “oh, look at that pretty red one”. Being Peruvian, her car knowledge was/is limited and understanding of the gringo car culture even more so, but she liked that “pretty red one”. So, before you know it, I was poking around under the hood and trying to crawl under the car, all the while remembering back to my California days when I was torn between the 68/69 shark gill style and the 70/71 vent style on the big block cars. As usual, I knew very little about how to determine originality and the like, but ended up making the place a package deal offer and bought them both. There’s something to be said about not having cars for years, recently retiring and having a pocket full of separation pay, and a newly purchased house with a decent size shop. I’m not sure what you can say about all that, but the combination resulted in two new additions to the family. A bit later my wife, a huge Prince fan, came up with a highly original name for it – “Little Red Corvette”.
Hmmm… now how to get them home. Pay for shipping? No way, gotta be fun to drive them all the way from Texas to Washington, right? So I arranged with a car nut buddy to fly down, pick them up and drive back. As he was more in tune with this thing than I was, his first “gotta do this” recommendation was Walmart for a console with cup holders, walkie-talkies and then Harbor Freight to put an emergency tool kit together – all very sage advice, as the tool kit got put into use more than once, but mostly on the Firebird. Well, except for that time when the blinker stuck on in LA traffic and we had to find a steering wheel puller to sort that out… and that time when the voltage regulator went out and fried the battery – but other than that the trip home with that car went pretty smooth and even averaged around 14 mpg with the 3.08 gears. In fact, we had to nurse the Firebird to Phoenix, after which it was shipped home, and pile out stuff in the ‘vette for the remainder of the trip.
As this and the Firebird were my first muscle cars, I really didn’t have much of a clue on how to work on them, so I took it to a mechanic friend who put it on the rack and, as usual, found a bunch of stuff that needed fixing. Knowing no better, I took it up to a “fantastic” place up in Arlington to get a pile of work done – ever since then it’s had an overheating problem, something that was never the case on the drive home, even in stop and go Phoenix traffic at 100 degrees. So, after a radiator rebuild, new water pump and fan clutch, new thermostat, distributor re-curve and timing/fuel mixture check all failed to address the problem, I basically parked it for a time, got busy with other stuff, more house remodeling, the Boss and the Impala, work on the old truck and forum searches to see what to do with the car.
Fast forward to 2025, when I took a deep dive and realized the car was most likely originally a small block car that had been converted to a L71 big block; the engine checks out as a proper solid lifter 427/435 tri-power but is from 1969, the tranny and rear end were both from earlier years (C2 vettes, in fact) and the cooling system was a mixture of big block and small block, with a big block radiator but small block shroud that didn’t fit correctly and also a small block expansion tank. Oddly enough it worked for the trip home, but then didn’t, so I tried to track back what had been done in Arlington and found several things that didn’t add up. So of course in trying to fix this problem I also reckoned it needed a Tremec 5 speed, hydraulic clutch, new brakes and brake lines, wider wheels, Borgeson power steering, full Ride-Tech adjustable suspension, removal of the vacuum-operated cowl and headlights and replacement with electric motors, new brake lines, all new hoses, better seats, fiberglass repair and head shielding underneath, replacement of the rusted out body mounts and bolts, and all the other stuff one finds when putting a 50+ year old car up on a lift.
The car was fired up and moved/stopped under its own power in late 2025, so now it’s just buttoning up a few items, new paint (as I managed to drop a jack stand on it and cracked the fender, there’s a few other nicks and damage and… you know… “might as well since I’ve already done this much”). Oh, and I need a tilt column since the new seats sit too high, even with a smaller steering wheel.
Anyway, Little Red Corvette is meant to be a keeper so it’s never going for NCRS judging, it’s a car built how I want it and intend to enjoy driving it.
