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How My Troubled High School Years Made Me Fall In Love With Corvettes

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My name is Zelda and this is my Corvette story. All my life I have always loved cars and many different types of cars, I played with Hot Wheels, played racing video games like Need for Speed and Gran Turismo and grew up with movies like The Fast and the Furious. When I was a kid I counted down the days to when I would turn 16 and get my drivers license. My first car was a 2005 Nissan Sentra that was a hand-me-down from my dad, I had a full fiberglass body kit on it, I spray painted it bright neon green and spray painted the hood, roof and trunk lid black, I had a Street glow lime green under glow kit on it, a PlayStation 2 in the glove box with a Kenwood head unit that had a fold out screen, 2 giant subwoofers in the trunk and a cold air intake with a cat-back exhaust.

So as a young teenager with a modified tuner car I thought I was the coolest person in town. One night while driving on the interstate i came across a black modified C5 Corvette, he flashed his lights at me and we lined up at 40MPH and i raced him. He blew my doors off by a mile. So that immediately had me looking at Corvettes and setting it as a goal of mine to own and modify one. I was drawn to Corvettes with loving them since i was a kid and also because I found from my research to be the perfect all around car, its a very affordable sports car that's lightweight, reliable, easy to work on, has a HUGE aftermarket support and can make a lot of power when modified but already is powerful enough out of the box, and being an American I have that patriotic feeling of having an American made sports car that can compete and outperform most European sports cars and exotics.

When my Sentra got totaled after an old lady ran a stop sign outside of a Walmart parking lot, I was shopping for another car and I knew exactly what I wanted, however as a broke high school student I didn't have the budget for a C5 or especially a C6 Corvette, so I instead starting shopping around for C4's after my dad gave me the money from the insurance payout. One day as I was driving on the county highway to work in my 1995 Ford Taurus that i inherited from my grandmother. I drove by what was then a small used car dealer lot and out front sat this yellow 84 C4 with C5 wheels on it with a sticker price of $4000, I immediately pulled over and looked at it, after i test drove the car i came back the next day with my dad, negotiated on a price, bought the car and drove it home. What I didn't expect was with buying the only Corvette I could afford at the time was the issues that this particular car had, mostly because it was not well taken care of by the previous owner. It was a 1984 which with the C4 was the first and only year with the L83 Crossfire injection motor, the starter was on its last leg, I had to jump the car off some mornings to get to school or drive my Ford Taurus with a slipping automatic transmission. The targa roof was covered in yellow duct tape because when someone before me had driven the car, they didn't latch the top down at all, and anybody who's been in a C4 coupe knows you need a wrench to take off the top. They took the car on a drive and the targa roof blew off in the wind shattering all of its fiberglass.

While I did have fun with the car, I had started at looking to get rid of it and start shopping for a 94-96 C4 as I learned they were the best of the bunch in terms of the base model C4's with more (now basic) features like traction control, dual front airbags, a MUCH nicer and more cozy interior and most of all: they had the underrated powerhouse of the LT1. When I finally found what I consider to be my "forever C4" I fell in love with it almost immediately, its my 1994 Corvette Convertible that is VIN 100600, the 600th car built for the 1994 model year, at the time it had around 50,000 miles. Driving a 1984 C4 and then driving a 1994 C4 is a night and day difference, its a completely different car that's been improved in every way possible, Chevrolet made numerous changes to the C4 during its 12 year run and it really shows.

My high school years were not the best years of my life as I had experienced bullying, falling grades, someone tearing a hole in my convertible top and trying to steal my radio in the school parking lot and working 2 jobs to be able to have my car and somewhat support myself since me and my mom didn't have a good relationship and she was almost always never home and I had to rely on myself to eat and buy my own clothes. But I always had my Corvette and it was the best therapy I could have at the time, walking out to it in the school parking lot, putting the convertible top down and blasting The Prodigy or The Crystal Method from the speakers was my way of turning a bad day into a great one. I had begun to fall more and more in love with Corvette C4's specifically from how much GM updated the car during its production run, to the story of the one and only 1983 Corvette, to how the C4 was designed to be less visible to radar guns and all the super cool C4's like the Callaway's, the Sledgehammer Twin Turbo, the Grand Sport and of course: the mighty King of the Hill ZR-1

In May/June 2016 I had to sell my 94 C4 to be able to move out of my moms house and get out of that situation, I didn't want to but I had no choice at the time, so I sold her to a very good friend of mine and i made him promise me that he would sell her back to me whenever I was able to buy it back. He kept that promise, took AMAZING care of the car during his ownership and fixed all the little and big things like paint correction and the optispark, and in Summer of 2024 after 8 long years apart, I bought it back for the second and last time. It's a forever part of my collection and I will never ever part with this car again. Today I own my 94 C4 with 78,000 miles and my 05 C6 with over 157,000 miles and those numbers will continue to go up as i enjoy driving and using my cars for their intended purpose. the C6 is my daily driver and was the car I badly wanted more than anything since I was a kid after driving C6's in video games and being it was the hot new Corvette that came out when i was in the first grade.

I'm so thankful and fortunate to be able to have my 2 Corvettes, from my favorite generation and second favorite generation. I've always wanted to get involved in the Corvette hobby and meet Corvette people and now that I'm an adult with adult money, I'm so happy to finally be part of the Corvette family. I've always wanted to meet people like Mike Yager after learning he owns the very last C4 ever built. I watched the video on YouTube of the Last C4 being built 10-15 years ago and made it a bucket list item to see the car in person. Mike signing my engine cover as a homage to the thousands of signatures on the Last C4 and him letting me sit in the Last C4 is an amazing experience I will never ever forget. I've owned and loved over 20 cars from Mustangs, Camaros, BMW's and various JDM tuner cars, but Corvettes are what i keep coming back to and are the cars I love the most because there's nothing else that comes even close to them.
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