Meet the Fleet – Sportscars: Corvette Grand Sport

• BODY: Johnny Lightning
• WHEELS & TIRES: Vincent

There can’t be a Gen-X American kid out there who doesn’t remember the joy of Saturday morning cartoons! And what was the best part of Saturday morning cartoons? The commercials, of course! And, what was the second best part of Saturday morning cartoons? That would be SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK! The Multiplication Rock episodes are where we got this little ditty:

As a 2^nd grader not particularly good at math, I felt a lot like the little mouse in this cartoon when it came time to take a test on the “Nine Tables.” There’s those aggravating odd numbers again! Fortunately, as an adult I’m over all that…the only number I’m really afraid of now is 13, which anyone will tell you makes perfect sense! A lot of racers should fear this black and yellow Corvette Grand Sport, though, because this is a FAST number! Wearing Vincent “Alpina” wheels and low-profile tires and equipped with a stock but very “tight” new Ultra-G chassis, this car is so fast that it often seems like too much of a good thing, as it’s a real handful for any driver and a challenge to keep on the track.

Which is only right, considering the real car its based on was quite a handful as well! Only 5 Corvette Grand Sports were made in 1962 and 63 before bean counting wankers at GM corporate pulled the plug on the project, but fortunately all 5 have survived (2 of the original 5 coupes were decapitated and turned into roadsters).

Even more fortunately, the legend of the Grand Sport lives on in HO scale, and down in my basement I renact those age old rivalries from all those decades ago: the Corvettes against the Cobras against the Jaguar E-Types against the Ferrari 250 GTOs…and “Naughty Nasty Mean Ol’ Number Nine” often wins those scraps!

The threat she poses to competitors and the fight she puts up with drivers gave her the nickname inspired by this old memory from those carefree weekend mornings of long ago, the days when kids grew up without cell phones, email, and “cancel culture.” So tell me folks…do you miss it???

Hey, it’s Saturday morning! Time for a bowl of cereal-flavored sugar and milk and a sing-along session with Schoolhouse Rock before heading for the track!