1972 Chevrolet Corvette C3 – Auction Car of the Week

For any of you fine folk reading this that are considering selling with us here at Car & Classic (and you really should – as Europe’s largest classic marketplace we get your vehicle in front of four million monthly site visitors) this is how you photograph a car. Yes, it helps that the car in question is a particularly stunning Corvette Stingray C3 in a beautiful burnt orange hue but it could be a boggo Toyota Starlet and it would still look amazing just by virtue of the quality of the imagery.

We cannot stress enough just how important decent photography is when it comes to selling your classic car or bike (or boat, or plane…). If you’re selling with us and opt for one of our performance auction packages we’ll send out a pro, but for those on a budget, or if you’re creating an advert, then putting in a little time and effort behind the camera is well worth it and can pay dividends when it comes to the final sale price. However you feel about third-gen Corvettes in general, however, just have a browse of the photos on this Stingray’s listing and tell us it doesn’t look amazing. You can’t do it can you…

The Chevrolet Corvette started out as a rather elegant roadster way back in 1953, serving as inspiration for rival Ford’s Thunderbird, a car that would subsequently clobber the Corvette in terms of sales figures. In a bid to distance itself from said Thunderbird, GM made the second generation Corvette a little more shouty and included a host of new design elements that marked it out from the previous model, including that famous tapered rear end. But it was the C3, introduced in 1968, that really broke the mould in terms of styling and ushered in a whole new aesthetic for the Corvette.

The C3 Corvette was based on General Motors designer Larry Shinoda’s ‘Mako Shark II’ concept that in turn was developed from the earlier ‘Mako Shark’ project overseen by GM’s Styling and Design head Bill Mitchell. Mitchell had caught said fish whilst deep sea fishing and was so inspired by the shark’s shape that he briefed Shinoda to design the C3 Corvette in its image, and boy what an image it is.

With it’s long bonnet that seems to go on forever, muscular haunches and Kamm tail rear end it’s a striking piece of design that still causes a stir to this day. Arguably the craziest of all the ‘Vettes it was also equipped with some pretty bonkers engines. Released at the height of the muscle car wars, at a time when the V8 was king, the C3 was available with a whole host of eight-cylinder lumps over its 14 year production run. From 5.0-litre small blocks all the way up to fire breathing 7.4-litre monsters pushing out over 400bhp, there was an engine for every level of hoonery imaginable.

And for those that do appreciate a bit of displacement the C3 we have available via our auctions platform features the largest big block, 7.4-litre V8 offered, mated to a four-speed manual gearbox. ’70-’72 cars got a few exterior and interior design updates over the previous ’68-’69 models and our example has a removable hardtop and optional luggage rack to boot… on the boot… trunk.

Purchased from a collector and imported from Nevada in 2018 the car is in excellent condition both inside and out, leading us to believe that the 22K figure displayed on the odometer is genuine. The distinct lack of any real wear and tear to the interior, and indeed the bodywork, further corroborates this theory and the vendor informs us that the Corvette has been nothing but cherished and there are no issues mechanically other than a slightly sticky handbrake, which in our experience should be a cheap and simple fix.

This C3 then presents as a wonderful opportunity to own an iconic piece of American muscle car lore. Eminently usable and a real head turner there’s a lot to like here and if it was good enough for space ace Buzz Aldrin then it’s certainly good enough for any of us humble earth dwellers. Anyway, we’ll sign off now and let the pictures do the talking.