The Corvette From When I was a Kid

When I was a kid in the ’80s, we knew things. We knew what an MG was (the rubber-bumpered MGB). We knew what a Triumph was (the TR7), and we knew the VW Beetle was the most common item on the road. And we knew that the Corvette was the one people called the Plastic Pig.

But back in 1967, this was a new and exciting vehicle which, like every Corvette since (at least until Road & Track lost its way), merited the cover of the magazine.

Unlike the ore recent versions of the car, R&T found a lot of reasons to be critical of this particular iteration. As with most American cars of the day, they found it to be too big for its intended purpose, as well as being inefficiently packaged (the opposite of the mythical palaces bigger on the outside than on the inside, apparently). Worse, they were unimpressed with the overall handling balance.

And they said so. Clearly.

Which is interesting. My own R&T era, 1989-2014 or so was a time when criticisms of cars were definitely printed, but never as pungently as the magazine appeared to do in the 1960s. Was this just a question of cars getting better (remember that in the 1970s cars were regulated into utter worthlessness, and it took engineers a decade to get the problems under control), or did the magazine get softer as society became more thin-skinned?

I suspect a combination of both (and I shudder to imagine what would be said on social media if magazine editors today actually spoke their minds about stuff–not just cars–in the way the did in the 1960s), plus a drive for corporate profitability. The sense that you could antagonize sponsors doesn’t seem to be something 1990s corporate magazines would accept.

The rest of the mag was per usual, and It’s amazing how much more I enjoy reading these than 1970s issues, despite there being only a short gap between them.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a high concept science fiction novel entitled–perhaps controversially–Fat Man. He hopes readers enjoy the book as much as he loved writing it… but mainly, he hopes it makes them think. You can check it out here.