Confessions of a Car Addict: 1972 Chevrolet Corvette LT-1

It must have been an odd sight. A burly bloke kneeling on the driver’s seat of a Corvette facing backwards, another bloke in the passenger seat angled across the cabin, his left leg stuffed deep into the driver’s footwell. We were in a petrol station. I didn’t know the burly bloke, but he had generously offered to jump start my silent Chevrolet. That was before he knew that this would involve more than simply opening the Corvette’s bonnet, locating its battery and connecting the cables to his Transit pick-up truck.

The battery of a 1972 C3 Chevrolet Corvette lives not under the bonnet but behind the driver’s seat, deep within a lidded box. It lives there because a Corvette of this era has no boot lid. Access is thus challenging, the task all the harder because the battery terminals expose only small sections of metal with which to make a connection. So he had to hold the jump lead clamps against the terminals. Why was I in the passenger seat? Because the ’72 Corvette requires you to fully depress the clutch before the starter turns, which was why I had my left leg in the footwell, the legacy of an era when car theft in the US was rampant.

I mention this only because this Corvette seems to trigger enthusiastic reactions wherever it goes. The Transit-driving Samaritan merely wanted to hear the V8 roar when I drove off. I was very happy to oblige. The Corvette wouldn’t start because its fanbelt had shredded, a process that had begun during a session on a rolling road. That session came at the end of a Corvette-fettling exercise that has been drawn out, and expensive. But, I think, worth it.