The car that changed me – the Corvette Stingray

I figured a post about our rental car life at @weekend_whips is long overdue, so I’ll start you off with a story about red hot love in a removable hardtop.

This isn’t the first sports car we rented, it isn’t even the second or third, but it was the one that made me fall in love with Corvettes. Compared to some of the cars I’ve rented since, the Corvette Stingray is nothing special, but it does hold a special spot in my heart.

It was a warm (hot as balls) summer day in 2018 and we decided after breakfast to swing by our favorite car rental spot, the airport. We had reserved a sports car but the way rentals work, it’s not really guaranteed so when we showed up all they could offer were boring stock V6s. A spicy red Corvette caught my eye as we peeked at the car lot so we decided to go for it even though we had really low expectations of it.

All my life I’ve been told that the Corvette drives rough and has issues that have been dissected by people way more knowledgeable than myself, but I had this impression in my mind of the Corvette experience. Chances are if you haven’t driven one that was built in the late 2010’s that you probably share this opinion too. Well, I’m here to tell you that WE WERE ALL WRONG.

Basically, the C6 and newer models are completely different Corvettes than we thought before. Up until this point, I had only driven muscle cars like Camaros/Mustangs so I was expecting it to drive like a really over-torqued heavy beast. What I actually drove was one of the most docile vehicles I’ve driven to date. 100/10 would drive again.

We ended up going up to our favorite mountain spot, Loon Lake, up and down the best parts of the road one time each driver and then woke up early the next day to explore Amador County too on highway 49. I fully expected it to overheat when we were in the mountains, it was like 105 in Sacramento that day and near 90 in the mountains. We moved the temperature gauge a little but nothing to worry about, although the AC did struggle to keep us cool. I was really impressed with everything for a stock sports car like the Corvette. All in all, we ended up putting a clean 500 miles on the car in just 25 hours and it was a hard goodbye at the rental drop-off, considering we were an hour late.

I don’t know if it was the cool factor of the car, or because I had such low expectations to begin with, but this one definitely left a mark in my mind. I still consider this my favorite car although I’d probably never daily-drive one, even though you totally could if you could afford the regular door ding and rock chip repairs.

Since this rental, we’ve rented again like the Grand Sport, but nothing compares to your first time.