For the 82nd running of the Indianapolis 500, the 1998 Chevrolet Corvette convertible was chosen as the official pace car, the fourth 'Vette to receive the honor.
The 1,158 Official Pace Car replicas were mechanically pretty much identical to the actual cars that paced the race, save for the light bar and the slightly freer-flowing intake on the track cars.
Painted a special Radar Blue color with yellow/white/purple decals, they had an eye-popping yellow and black leather interior and yellow five-spoke alloy wheels.
Under the hood was the 345 horsepower 5.7L pushrod LS1 V-8. (While the metric displacement was the same, the LS small blocks that had debuted in 1997 actually displaced 346 cubic inches and were a clean sheet of paper design not related to the small blocks that had been powering previous 'Vettes going back to the mid 1950s.)
When Car and Driver tested the new C5 1997 Corvette in hardtop coupe form, they got a zero-to-sixty time of 4.9 seconds and smoked the quarter in 13.4 seconds at 108 miles per hour. These would have been numbers associated with Italian exotica only a few years prior.
Base price of a '98 droptop 'Vette was $44,425, and the Pace Car package (which included a generous helping of luxury options as well as the eye-catching cosmetics) added $5,039 with an automatic or $5,802 for the six-speed manual. An interesting side note is that these were the first Corvette pace cars which had the livery applied at the factory rather than the dealer.
The one in the photo was snapped with a Canon EOS M and EF-M 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS in May of 2019.
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