The second generation of the Corvette was a stylistic triumph that had engineers pulling their hair. The Sting Ray is one of those cars that, like the E-Type Jaguar, you can't really appreciate until you see one out motoring around among the Accords and RAV-4s and Chrysler minivans of day-to-day traffic.
The sleek lines generated lift at speed and made handling sketchy when you started getting near triple digits. Chevy was Officially Not Racing at the time, so when 'Vette engineer Zora Arkus Duntov and his posse snuck a This Isn't A Factory Race Car, Honest out the back door, the Grand Sport was festooned with vents and an elaborate air dam to keep it from turning into a frisbee on the back straight.
This was also the first year that a hardtop Corvette coupe was offered, and Larry Shinoda's design for it had a solid longitudinal panel dividing the rear glass, which is why 1963 Sting Ray coupes are known as "split windows". (This formed a handy vertical blind spot smack in the middle of the rear view mirror, and was removed for '64, which is why only '63 Sting Ray coupes are known as "split windows".)
1963 was the only year of the C2 'Vette where the coupe was almost as popular as the convertible: 10,594 coupes versus 10,919 ragtops were sold.
You could get the new 'Vette with any one of four flavors of 327 cubic inch V-8. The base four-barrel motor had hydraulic lifters, a 10.5:1 compression ratio, and was rated at 240 SAE gross horsepower. Going with the L75 option got a bigger Carter AFB carburetor and different heads and exhaust manifolds and bumped the output to 300hp. The gnarliest carbureted motor was the solid lifter L76, which raised the compression ratio to 11.25:1 and the rated output to 340 horsepower. Finally, the king of Corvette hill was the fuel-injected L84 327, boasting 360 horsepower at 6,000rpm.
Car & Driver tested a 1963 Sting Ray coupe with the L75 V-8, 4-speed manual, and 3.36:1 rear end and reported 0-60 times between 6.0 and 6.4 seconds and managed a best quarter mile time of 14.4 seconds at 100mph.
The Riverside Red ragtop in the pictures was snapped with a Nikon D7100 and an 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II zoom lens in June of 2022.
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