Why nothing like a 1983 Corvette

With its rare production models, classic racers and intriguing concept cars, the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Kentucky, will impress even casual car enthusiasts. Indeed, in the midst of all this automotive flash, an ordinary, seemingly normal, white model from the fourth generation of car design – "C4" to the cognoscenti Corvette – might not give the impetus.

But that surely raises the eyebrows.

This C4 is anything but normal. It's a 1983 Chevrolet Corvette, very unusual since there was no Corvette for the 1983 model year. For its 30th anniversary, the oldest sports car in the United States, designed to display the speed, power and ingenuity of the United States in a traditionally car-dominated class. European countries, took a somewhat mysterious sabbatical year.

But why?

The model year that was not – and the car that was not supposed to be

Originally planned as a 1982 model, the fourth-generation Corvette, by far the most advanced of the era, was initially pushed back to the introduction of the fall of 1982 as a model of 1983, then in the spring 1983, while ambitious upgrades were slow. At that time, Chevrolet had decided to designate the 1983 Corvette by 1984.

The museum's white car, however, is an authentic 1983 Corvette, the only one in the world. How did it happen? Built June 28, 1982, it was the fourth of 43 "pilot-mounted" vehicles designed to validate production processes and other engineering, testing and training goals. The current practice of the sector is to crush these vehicles once this work is completed because they can not be sold to the public.

Forty-two of the C4 pilot cars have experienced this spell, but one of them, known as RBV098, has passed by. In 1984, a new factory manager found her parked outside, neglected. He had it cleaned and exposed. He also got an American flag pattern painting job, which was subsequently replaced by the original white. When the museum opened in 1994, General Motors loaned RBV098 and finally donated it. RBV098 is now a unicorn, an artifact of one of the most radical improvements Corvette ever made.