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Written by:
Autocar staff
http://www.autocar.co.uk
08/21/2008 - 04:12 PM
London, UK
Bremner's initial buyer's remorse soon faded. (Autocar photo) » More Photos
You may well have felt it: that moment when the exhilaration of winning an eBay auction is replaced, sometimes quite rapidly, by the feeling of regret that you have been so rash. And in this case, there were plenty of reasons for regret. I had just got up at five in the morning in England to bid for a car that I had never seen, that was thousands of miles away in Montana, and that I wasn’t completely convinced was the example I really wanted.
But at 5:21 a.m. I hit “Place bid” and won a 1965 Chevrolet Corvair Monza Corsa costing $8500. All I needed to do now was pay, get it back to the UK and lie down to wonder what I’d done.
There’d be more wondering a few weeks later, when my friend Bryan Smart and I stood before this silvery Corvair on a cold Montana morning and concluded that I’d bought the wrong car. It was the car I’d seen in the eBay ad, and it had been accurately described, but my hopes that it would have the pristine interior of an 18,500-miler were dashed with one glance at its tatty, faded carpets.
An 18,500-miler? That’s what it said in the ad and on the clock, and though the Chevy’s seller had never guaranteed this, there were good reasons for believing it. I’m a sucker for low-mileage cars, and those 18,500 miles and the fact that this was the hot, rare, 140hp Corsa version of the Corvair were enough to overcome my doubts. Doubts only mildly reinforced by the fact that the name of its faintly purply, silver paint – officially called Evening Orchid – sounded like a camp greeting.
There wasn’t much sign of that purple tint as we stared at the Corvair, but equally, there wasn’t much evidence of a time warp survivor either. It was simply a sound but unexceptional 43-year-old car. I had flown thousands of miles to buy a classic that I suddenly didn’t want but which I had to drag across the USA and send home.
Of course, you may well ask why I wanted an example of the car at all, given that it was infamously dubbed “Unsafe At Any Speed” by consumerist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader. But I’ve become fascinated by the look, the mechanicals and the history of this unusual American machine, and the Mk2 version that turned up on eBay was a vastly better car.
"The Corvair made appropriate noises and didn't have a single rattle or squeak." (Autocar photo) » More Photos
The Corvair was launched in 1959 as GM’s answer to the VW Beetle, which was selling faster than burgers at Disneyland. It was a lot bigger than the VW, but it was also rear-engined and powered by an air-cooled flat six rather
That this makes it a little Porsche-like wasn’t the reason I bought one, though trivia lovers will be intrigued to learn that GM may well have been first to install a flat six in a Porsche (it used 356 coupes as development mules). The Corvair, however, was about being cheap to buy and cheap to run. And these merits were what it was bought for until the arrival of a pretty coupe in 1960, which had buyers desiring it for its sporty qualities, despite evil on-the-limit handling that would earn it Nader’s wrath.
GM would battle him in court and eventually redesign the Corvair from bumper to bumper for 1965, to produce one of the best-looking coupes of the 1960s. And it’s one of these re-engineered Corvairs that got me interested a couple of years back, and had now brought me to Great Falls.
Of course, I didn’t buy this car without talking to its owner first, not least to find out whether they were willing to take an overseas bid. This conversation would be my only chance to size the buyer up, and for them to do the same to me. My call reached the charming Shelley Turk, who was willing to take the bid and turned out to have lived in Bury St Edmunds. After our chat, and a study of her eBay record, I convinced myself that she was an upstanding citizen of Great Falls and unlikely to cease being one for the sake of $8500.
I arranged shipping for an amazingly modest $800, including insurance. All Smart and I had to do was get the Corvair to Newark, 2400 miles away. My original mission was to part-drive and part-trailer it across the U.S., but that plan was frustrated by the apparent impossibility of getting insurance cover. That meant that one of the more romantic aims of the trip evaporated in an instant.
The alternative was U-Haul; for $1600 I could rent a truck and trailer to tow the Chevy the whole way. Great Falls U-Haul manager Mike Lucker provided fine advice on the perils of forgetting about the size of the truck: “Don’t visit a drive-thru McDonald’s unless you want to draw attention to yourself,” he said. “I did it once and pulled half the roof off the building.”
And so we were handed the keys to a Ford F-350, whose yelling engine is possibly the loudest piece of machinery I’ve heard since Concorde was grounded. Still, in its favor were effective air conditioning, surprisingly comfy vinyl seats and an air of indestructibility that would be tested by America’s sometimes astonishingly battered interstates.
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