In 2003, Chevrolet"s Corvette celebrated its 50th birthday by barely slowing down to blow out the candles. Why dilly-dally when even better times lay ahead? Two years later, Chief Engineer David Hill"s team took what was already America"s supreme performance machine and transformed it into one of the planet"s greatest. Standard performance now qualified as downright surreal: 0-60 in 4.2 seconds and a top end of 186 miles per hour.
What a long, strange trip it"s been. Nearly cancelled a few years after its birth, rumored near death or dilution more than one time since, Chevy"s fantastic, plastic two-seater is rolling on more confidently than ever, this after six distinct generations of development. Code names for those generations came into vogue during the radically redesigned 1997 Corvette"s long haul to market after Chevrolet people let it be known that this all-new platform was identified in-house by the simple "C5" designation. It was only logical to retroactively label previous generations accordingly: Original solid-axle models built from 1953 to 1962 made up the C1 group; the C2 family consisted of the classic Sting Rays of 1963 to 1967; the C3 era spanned from 1968 to 1982; and the C4 ran from 1984 to 1996. (Chevrolet skipped the 1983 model year, as fourth-generation development work ran past its deadline).
The fifth-generation Corvette was initially targeted for introduction in August 1992, just in time to help commemorate the Corvette"s 40th anniversary. But various pitfalls pushed that debut back repeatedly, first for the 1994 model year, then 1995. When all was said and done, the long-awaited C5 officially appeared in January 1997. The latest rendition, the expectedly tabbed C6, followed eight years later to take the Corvette legacy to all-new heights. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Complete Book of Corvette: Every Model Since 1953 (Mike Mueller)