The People’s Car BREAKING HEARTS IN THE HEARTLAND.

As we pulled out of the Wendy’s drive-thru, the engine throbbing in front of us and the seven-speed manual adroitly skip-shifting me into fourth, my five-year-old son looked sad, thoughtful, and curious, all at the same time.

“Why,” he asked, “was the restaurant man crying? Did we do something bad?”
“Oh no, we didn’t. We just bought our food. I’m sure he’s fine now.”“Then why was he crying?”

To be honest, I hadn’t given it much thought. At that point, I’d been driving our long-term 2014 Corvette for about four days, and I’d seen much stranger reactions.

Despite what you read everywhere from the Washington Post to the Huffington Post, we’re still a car-crazy nation. People want to know what a car costs, how fast it goes, any dimension or capacity that seems significant.

“Hey, man, what size brake discs you got on that thing?”
“Er, um, pretty big.”
“That’s what I thought! THAT’S WHAT I
THOUGHT!” And so on.
In the course of driving the Corvette from Ann Arbor to Summit Point, West Virginia,
however, I encountered something bigger and deeper than info-tourism or random curiosity. This car’s been on the market for a while.

By May of 2014, most Americans had probably seen the C7 Corvette. With merica’s only real sports car, familiarity apparently doesn’t breed contempt.
Take a Porsche on this route through Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia proper, as I’ve
done many times, and you’ll be alternately ignored, sneered at, and stared down. A Nissan GT-R brings out the otaku  and the Play-Station crowd, but their primary mission is to make sure you understand that they know more about the car than you do. You might be the possessor of the GT-R, but the car actually belongs to them, the true fans.

“So, did you Accessport the clutch pressure to six or seven?”
“Ah, um, six, seven, whatever it takes.”
“I see.” And then the Look that informs you that you have no business driving an R35 Sky-anything. It’s a club, and not even the owners are guaranteed entry.
The membership of the Corvette fan club, on the other hand, includes everyone. Children hang out of the back windows of pickups to hear you rev the engine.
Young women smile; older ones wink. In Dublin, Ohio, a G37 stopped behind me in a parking lot and two buffedout guys jumped out to look through the Vette’s windows.

When I suggested they sit in it and rev the engine, they looked like children who suspected some kind of catch. After, Thing 1 said to Thing 2, “I’ll own one of those if I have to wait till I’m 40 years old.”
Whoa. Not 40 years old.
Around Summit Point, the C7 was devastating, at least three seconds a lap ahead of what I’d seen in a C6. The other drivers came to it in what must have looked, from above, like a trail of ants on the way to a pile of sugar. Which options did it have? (Most of them.) How fast was I hitting the track’s “ski jump”? (127 mph indicated.) How was the 500-mile drive from Michigan? (Easy, thanks to perfect seats and a four-cylinder Eco mode that saw the car return a 29-mpg average.) They wanted to look at it, sit in it, sit next to it, touch it. A Maserati GranTurismo sat alone in the paddock not far away. A Ferrari F430 Challenge growled past and nobody cared.

The Corvette had a circle of drivers standing and chatting around it. Their conversation was knowledgeable and hopeful. I heard a lot of “if I pick one up” and “if I order one.”At the end of my time with the Corvette, I thought I finally had my finger on why the car is so important to so many. Ferraris are for the bewilderingly wealthy. Porsches are for the snobby and standoffish. But Corvettes are just for us. For regular people. The American Dream,  in  many  cases,  involves  a  diaperrubbed Corvette in a retirement community or a blacked-out Z06 thundering down a back road or a daily-driven convertible in a fairweather state. It feels attainable and achievable but no less desirable for it. It could happen. You might end up with one, and the fact that this C7 is the best Corvette, maybe the best American car, in history, is cheering in a very personal sense.

In  most  cases,  anyway.  When  it  was  time to pay for our hamburgers at that Wendy’s, the man who leaned out was my age, his face weathered, his teeth crooked and missing.
“That’s the new Corvette. The C7.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You and your boy like it?”
“We do.”
“Man, you’re in that car, with your boy,”
and now the tears were flowing, his face contorted, hiding behind his hand, “and I’m
working this job. I don’t see no way out.”
“Hey,” I said, as my son tried to see what was happening, “I’ve worked at these places.
Years, man. Drive-thru, line cook, all of it.”
But it didn’t comfort him.
As we drove away, he was yelling, his eyes open and streaming. “That’s the best, man! That car’s the best!”He’s right.