[1]Who trailers around a car on jackstands, on top of a wooden pallet?
From ProCharger’s Facebook page [2], we bring you this gem: A photo of a 2009 ZR1 with just 10 miles on the odometer, stripped of its drivetrain (and a lot more, from the looks of it), offered for sale with an asking price of $32,000. With little else to go on, we’re left with more questions than we can count. Assuming that they actually get their asking price for the shell, and they didn’t get a significant discount off of the list price of the car when they bought it, that means it cost something like $78k just to put an engine into a street rod.
[3]Now, rather than gutting a perfectly good ZR1 as a donor for your street rod, Pace Performance will happily sell you a brand new LS9 [4] for the low, low price of $20,409.88 (“ships in 1-2 business days”) and a Lingenfelter Performance Engineering [5] twin disc clutch for another $824.95 – throw in a super-badass built differential from LG Motorsports [6] ($4,345.99), one of their trick sequential gearboxes [7] ($28,295.95), a carbon fiber driveshaft ($1,395.00), and budget another five grand for “incidentals” like a torque tube, intercooler heat exchanger, and such, and you’ve still spent only $60,271.77. That leaves nearly $18,000 left over to buy fuzzy dice for the mirror of your T-bucket, compared to what happened here.
The really sad part about this isn’t that the economics don’t make sense, though – people are allowed to do whatever they want with their own property, even if it’s dumb. What pains us is the fact that it looks like there’s so much missing from this car already, besides the drivetrain (no front calipers for one obvious thing, and we hear the interior is gone too), that it will never be economical to put it back to running condition. This rare, pricey Corvette is doomed to being completely parted out, but let’s hope that it didn’t die in vain, and that it can become the donor so that other ZR1’s might live on…