Turn Heads (And Stomachs) With The Eyeball-Burning 1998 Corvette Pace Car

Pacing the Indy 500 is a great way for automakers to get some enthusiast eyeballs on their cars. Chevy first deployed a Corvette Pace Car in 1978, and its led the field of open-wheelers on many occasions since, most recently in 2021.

Many of those Corvettes featured bold colors and/or graphics to maximize exposure on TV and to hook fans into dealerships to buy one of the sanctioned replicas, each one too excited to think that driving said car 48 months later is the car equivalent of going on a date in 2022 wearing that ‘Cancun 2018’ T shirt you bought on your buddy’s bachelor party.

To be fair, there have been some reasonably classy looking pace cars over the years; the black and silver ’78 car springs immediately to mind. But then there’s the one that came 20 years later, looking like the design was decided after a nation-wide competition to create the most stylish livery, the catch being that it was only open to the under-fives.

Starting with the newly introduced C5 Corvette convertible painted in elegant metallic Radar Blue, Chevy’s design team then split for a lunch of Amazonian tree frog with some Mattel execs in charge of the Barbie account before returning to add bright yellow wheels and seats and the sort of chequered flag graphics you’d see on a $3 die-cast toy. Compared with the restrained elegance of the 2004 Le Mans Commemorative Edition C5 that came later it’s a stylistic car crash, but its job was to get noticed, and the ’98 certainly did that, particularly with racing legend Parnelli Jones at the wheel.

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Get past the questionable color scheme though, and the $5000 Pace Car rep had plenty to like, including the standard Bose hifi, electric seats and dual-zone climate. Mechanically, the 1158 replicas were no different to other C5s, meaning they had GM’s dependable, versatile 5.7-liter LS1 V8, which sent 345 hp (350 PS) to the rear wheels, though Vette resource CorvSport says the machines actually used at Indy were bumped to 370 hp and featured lowered suspension.

Most buyers went for the four-speed automatic, but 545 of them opted to row their own gears with the six-speed manual transmission fitted to the car seen here. Up for sale at $44,999, it’s covered just 3,183 miles from new, though whether that’s down to an attempt to preserve its condition or because the owners were simply too embarrassed to be seen in public in it, we can’t say.

We’re big fans of the underrated C5 Vette, and the ’98 Pace Car is an interesting and important piece of Corvette history, but we’d prefer to pick up a bargain standard car rather than pay $40k for a dayglo trailer queen. What about you?