When you’re so good that you get banned from the series which you were racing in, that’s a good day. That’s what happened to the Corvette team who had absolutely spanked anything that raced against them from 1985-87 in the Playboy/Escort Endurance Championship. How badly did it whip the competition? The next best competition came from the Porsche 944 Turbo, and the ratio was something like 29-0, Corvette. That badly. The Corvette had torque, had killer brakes, and could corner solidly. The Porsche couldn’t do a thing about it, so SCCA did – they banned the Corvette. Well, now you have racers with a winning combination that had nowhere to go…what then? Well, if the Corvettes were do good, why not do a spec series? Chevrolet was on board, the SCCA was on board, and it seemed destined to be a success. It only lasted for two seasons, but the Corvette Challenge drew some big names into the fold, like Tommy Kendall, Andy Pilgrim and Boris Said.
Option code B9P was the magic mark. Across the board, any Corvette with that RPO came as such: manual transmission (the Doug Nash 4+3 for 1988, the ZF six-speed for 1989), the Z51 performance suspension, a six-way power driver’s seat, the Delco-Bose sound system, a blue-tinted glass targa panel, and defoggers for the side windows and mirrors. Sounds plush for a factory racer, right? It was, but these cars were competing in a showroom stock class. All of the L98s that were dyno tested were within a hair of the factory rating of 245 horsepower, and all of the engines and transmissions were “sealed” with identifying marks on certain fasteners that would be the tattle-tale if someone had done something funny.
#42 here is one of the 30 1989 cars and was campaigned by Randy Ruhlman, then an up and coming driver who used the Corvette Challenge as his launching point. The car ran all twelve races that year, never crashed, never DNF’d according to the seller. The car is fully un-restored and has just over 6,000 of the hardest break-in miles ever recorded on the clock. But, for the most part, it’s a 1989 Chevrolet Corvette with a cage. Same engine, same trans, same stereo. We do wonder if that works…but even if it doesn’t, it’s a real-deal racer. One that would be awesome to enter in historical events, one that needs to get out and flex it’s muscles some.
