Hey guys, haven't been too heavy on the hot rods lately. Life has me spending a lot of time on the highway and none of my cars were up to that level of frequent hi speed long shot drives. I still wanted something older & cool, but it also had to be reliable, well built, fairly fuel efficient and easy to work on, so of course I settled for something that was none of those things. I really like C4s and always have, and with a flexible budget of about $6k for a highway car I had a lot of options. This car was listed by a small dealership nearby for $7000, but when I hit the dude up, he had just picked it up from another shop doing some work on it. He had left it with them for diagnostics and they ended up doing a ton of unauthorized work, refused to release the car until it was paid for, and the kicker... it no longer ran when it came back to him! I got it for the cost of the repairs - $3500. It has had a bunch of chassis work done, brakes, front end, etc and has a new transmission with less than 500 miles on it put in by its previous owner. Other than 40 yr old Corvette problems (mainly plastic) the car is really healthy. I warrantied the Autozone battery that was in it and had it running the same day and drove it home. I've been tinkering with it since and have been driving it for about 5 days. It's a 200hp crossfire car but it feels like a rocket ship. Super tight handling, very responsive and feels plenty fast. I love it! I was looking for a black on black manual car but manual C4s are pretty rare (and I have read the transmissions are problematic) and I really really like the color scheme and wheel combo on this car. I'll be back to working on real metal cars soon enough but I'm really enjoying this slight deviation...
I could have had one, but I have always heard the 84 is the best handling C4, and this car really grabbed me with the paint scheme, wing and wheel combo, and the body is in just tremendous shape with no rust issues to speak of in the undercarriage, so it is a great starting point. I figured a 350 is a 350, so there are lots of ways to make it faster if I want to, and an LS will fit anywhere a 350 was... but for now I am quite happy with the car as is. It has no problem ripping standing burnouts without help from the brakes, gets sideways when I ask it to, stays very controllable in slides, and makes all the right noises.
A buddy bought one when they first came out. I was prepared to be completely underwhelmed. I was quite surprised! Handled on rails and was really snappy! (especially for the era!) Have fun with that thing!
No expert on the C4s, but what I have learned messing with a few, the cross-fire was a mistake as is easily shown by the one year only usage. Good luck on parts and diagnostics, especially the ECU and other 1 year parts. Same with that digital dash. Hope it doesn't die of old age. The handling was panned as too rough and was mildly softened in later years. If it's has usual maintenance done like shocks, it's probably later model there anyway. They do corner a bit better than your truck, Mopar and T. Follow the lube points for the doors and the hood. You do not want to replace the door handles and you really don't want the hood latches to give you issues! Make sure the release is smooth and not at the end of it's travel. Electrical issues are often ground issues, even though they were designed with better grounding than steel body cars. You do not want to do a radiator, it's not fun. Make sure the cooling system is in good shape. A ton of cars of this vintage have aftermarket anti-theft. The vettes are less likely due to the pass key system, but any aftermarket alarm still in the loop is just asking for trouble. and a last suggestion; since the shop was doing all that shady stuff to another business, I'd look over every bit of the work they did. Honest shops do honest work. Crappy shops do... well check it out.
The Crossfire has a bad rap but it works fine other than some unintuitive quirks. Port injection is just better... there are so many Crossfire cars still on the road it's hard to argue the system doesn't have longevity. I have worked on a few customer cars before owning this one. You just can't slap a bunch of speed equipment in it and expect the computer to know what to do with it without programming, and programming that little bastard EPROM chip is a lot more work than adjusting a carburetor. I have had the ECU out of this car and looked it over, everything checked out good. The digital dash needs to be rebuilt as the LCDs are dead in the center gauges but the board is fine so eventually I'll send it off. The car handles really well which is no surprise... it has the Z51 handling package that got the C4 banned from SCCA for embarrassing Porsche 29 times in a row. It is a 'little' stiff - which is to say it rides a little softer than my Model T - but it handles as well at 140 as it does at 40. I called the shop that had it and asked if I could get copies of the invoices for the work they did on the car. That conversation went like this: "Hi, I bought a Corvette you guys did some work on and would like copies of what yall did on it for my records." "Which Corvette? Oh, is it the gold one?" "Yes, the gold '84." "Haha." *click* I know they did some of it, but some stuff they definitely didn't, or they fucked up other stuff in the process. I've found a lot of stupid shit they did... from the relatively harmless broken/unhooked vacuum lines to their brand new valve cover gaskets leaking, the distributor being loose after they had it out and reinstalled it, broken oil pressure lines, injectors installed wrong, TV cable left unadjusted, fan wiring broken while monkeying on the engine, etc. The seller was right... it wasn't gonna run again for him unless he paid someone else another bundle to sort out their work, so cutting his losses made sense. But it runs now and it runs damn good. I have a guy that can program the PROM chip for me to adjust for any speed stuff I wanna throw into it down the road. Or maybe I'll throw a Sniper mani on it, or just LS swap it if the wheezy old smog 350 starts getting tired. Right now the car just needs a lot of the little things to be really right. Plastic knobs and buttons giving up. Vacuum lines for climate control. That sort of shit. I have a hookup for that too. Right now the worst thing is this... Some drooler leant on the wing and broke it. This is not a factory item and most C4 wings are lower profile wings. I really like this wing... so now I gotta either find an old aftermarket wing and paint match it or buy a new one for $550 and paint match it. Maybe this one can be fixed, but I don't know anything about fiberglass and I'm not sure my first crack at fiberglass repair should be hanging out in a 140 mph airstream.
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