This car, Lot 229779, sold for $74,000, including buyer’s premium, on Bring a Trailer’s online sale on February 12, 2026.
The 1963 model year brought a clean-sheet redesign for Chevrolet’s Corvette, which was called the Sting Ray. The car was one of the first projects of Bill Mitchell, who replaced Harley J. Earl after his retirement in 1958.
Stung by a sports car
The new C2 Corvette (dubbed Mid-Year Corvette by fans) was based largely on the 1959 Corvette XP-87 Sting Ray Racer concept conceived by Mitchell, with input from Peter Brock and Larry Shinoda. The fenders were arched and widened, flip-up headlights were added and the rear end strongly resembled that of the 1961–62 Corvettes. For the first time, a Corvette coupe variant was produced and it had a unique feature: a center “spine” which bisected the rear window and ran rearward down the deck, giving it the look of a stingray’s backbone. This styling element would earn the car the nickname “Split-Window coupe.” Of the total 21,513 Corvettes built for 1963, 10,594 were coupes, the remainder being convertibles. The $4,252 base price included a 250-horsepower, 327-ci small-block V8, a 3-speed manual gearbox and vinyl interior.
The frame was of a perimeter design, leaving behind the previous generation’s “Safety Girder” X-frame. A fully independent rear suspension with a transverse leaf spring kept the rear tires planted. Hoods on 1963 Corvettes had faux vents toward the leading edge, while the outside rear-view mirror was taller, allowing better rearward vision over the arched rear fender. Exterior door handles were mounted atop a raised pad, and coupes had stainless trim forward of the side-wing windows, and B-pillars had faux vents. Most of the 1963 Sting Rays came with fiberglass headlight buckets, but those were changed to metal late in the production year.
The new Corvette’s interior was also completely revamped. A new perimeter frame allowed for the seats to sit within the frame rather than atop it, as in the previous generation. Doing so created much-needed headroom in the Corvette’s cabin. Two large, dome-shaped dash binnacles segmented driver and passenger, with a host of instruments on the driver’s side. A cascading dash center between the binnacles held a clock and vertically positioned radio; these were AM-only initially but AM/FM later on.
The passenger’s side of the dash featured a lockable glovebox as opposed to the lockable storage compartment located between the seats in previous years. Early in 1963 production, the area around the glovebox, radio speaker and radio was painted, but then switched to a black vinyl cover. Early production seats had depressions underneath, presumably for storage, but the depressions were eliminated later in the model year.
Engine and transmission choices were largely held over from the final C1 Corvettes, save for the fuel-injection units with larger intake plenums. During the 1963 production year, the 4-speed manual transmission supplier was changed from BorgWarner to Muncie.
Alas, the C2 coupe’s most notable styling feature was short-lived. When the split in the rear window was eliminated from the 1964 Corvette Sting Ray coupes ion favor of a continuous piece of curved glass, many short-sighted owners cut the dividing bar from their 1963 coupes and replaced it with the new 1964 window in an attempt to update their cars. Presumably, most or all of these Corvettes have been converted back to their original split windows now.
Absolute insanity?
There has long been a value premium attached to these Split-Window coupes. The novelty of this single-year styling element has driven 1963 coupe prices well beyond that of any other C2 coupe, including the 1965–67 396/427 big blocks, with project cars bringing well past six figures today.
With that said, little explains the frenzied action in our subject Split-Window coupe’s Bring a Trailer sale, with rabid bidding towards the end. This 1963 coupe project, or what was left of it, was so obviously not a car that BaT categorized the auction as “parts and automobilia” rather than as an automotive lot.
At some point, the car appeared to have suffered a hard frontal collision, with the front end, including fenders, bumpers and suspension, all missing. In fact, the entire frame was missing, as were the rear fenders, bonding strips, suspension and much of the rear deck. There was no drivetrain to speak of.
Inside, things weren’t much better. There was little left of the interior, save for two rotting seats and the dashboard, which had gauges from a later Mid-Year Corvette fitted. Several different colors dotted what was left of the mostly stripped body. Even a section of the “birdcage,” the part of the frame that runs from the windshield surround to the firewall, extending to the footwells, had some rot in it. But there was, somehow, a clean title and a VIN plate.
Several bidders were active in the auction, but as many of these sales tend to go, the real action was in the final minutes. By the start of the day, bidding was already at $24k, jumping to $36k by mid-morning with a single bid. A series of smaller bids in the next hour then took the car into $60k space. A final $2k knockout punch sold the car at a $70k hammer price, or $74,000 with BaT’s buyer’s premium added (10% with a $4,000 maximum for parts and automobilia). The BaT comment section was suitably stunned, with quips such as, “What just happened here?” “Unbelievable!” “Absolutely insane…” and simply, “LOL.”
Eye of the beholder
Lunacy doesn’t quite describe this result. It should be noted that this “car” will need at least $150k worth of work, and likely $200k or more, to be anything close to restored. If the buyer is going the resto-mod route, which seems to be the most likely scenario, the sky is the limit. By comparison, a complete 1963 Corvette coupe project with a L76 327-ci engine and automatic transmission swap sold a week later on BaT for $137,550 with premium. It had been repainted a different color from new, but everything was there. And seven days after that, another complete 1963 coupe with a running 400-ci V8 swap sold for $110,250 all-in, also on BaT.
Project cars have a way of bringing out starry-eyed dreamers, sometimes even when they appear largely unsalvageable. Think back to August 2023 and RM Sotheby’s “Lost and Found” Ferrari barn-find collection at its Monterey auction (November 2023, Market Report, p. 90). There, the crashed, twisted and burned-out hulk of a 1954 Ferrari 500 Mondial, sans powertrain, sold for $1.9m (SCM# 6961171). Or what about the October 2024 auctioning of the late Los Angeles scrapper Rudi Klein’s collection, dubbed by RM Sotheby’s as “The Junkyard” sale (February 2025, Market Report, p. 80)? Several of Klein’s salvage Porsches, Ferraris, Mercedes and others sold for into five- and six-figures for what most of us would charitably describe as scrap metal. Here, there wasn’t even that much metal…
This Split-Window coupe’s sale price was essentially a lottery win for the seller, but we hope to hear the follow-up story from the incurable optimist who took a chance on it.
