This car sold for $744,000 at the Bonhams & Butterfields auction at Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley, California, on August 15, 2008.
As the old AM radio stations used to sing, “The hits just keep on coming.” Only instead of Johnny Rivers or Creedence Clearwater Revival, some of the biggest automotive hits these days are the auction sales of cars, bikes, and memorabilia once connected to America’s most famous “real” car guys. Steve McQueen’s $2.3 million Ferrari Lusso. A Von Dutch helmet for $22,230. Or Carroll Shelby’s $5.5 million personal Cobra. Naturally, what financially separates these celebrity-owned items from their more common brethren is mostly the provenance that such ownership brings.
With the above-referenced AIR ’68 Corvette, provenance strikes again, this time riding the triple coattails of movie star James Garner, Corvette racer extraordinaire Dick Guldstrand, and the legend of the big-block L88 itself. “We got together through the movie ‘Grand Prix,’ and to do something special afterwards we bought three L88s and converted them to race cars,” Guldstrand recalls. “We raced them one time and did a lot of publicity with them.”
The “famous owner” premium
The appeal of owning a genuine FIA race car driven by Guldstrand and owned (in part) by driver/actor Garner is unmistakable, and with the chain of ownership of this car well documented, there was no doubt about its authenticity at auction. The quality and accuracy of the restoration were also said to be superb, and the fact that Dick Guldstrand himself fired up the car and rumbled it onto the stage certainly didn’t hurt. (In fact, such perceived validation of authenticity might have added significantly to the price.)
The L88 sold for $744,000 including buyer’s premium, a heady increase over the $250,000 to $500,000 a buyer might expect to pay for a perfectly restored street L88 of the same year. However, a genuine 1967 L88—the first year the option was offered and the last year of the quintessential Sting Ray body design—can command a much greater $2m to $3m today. But then, only 20 L88s were built for the highly coveted 1967 mid-year body design, compared to 196 for the next-generation “shark” design of 1968–69.
“Actually, I think it was worth more,” Guldstrand says of the ex-Garner AIR car. “I think it was a very good deal. There are not that many cars that were run that way, with James Garner, setting track records.”
Holding this car back from topping a million dollars is that it is a C3 Corvette and not the C2 mid-year model, and the fact that it only had a one-race FIA career and became a club racer after that. Still, three quarters of a million dollars is not exactly chump change for a Corvette—especially when it’s a privateer car and not a factory racer.
Why the L88 option matters
In 1968, Chevrolet’s Regular Production Order (RPO) L88 was the highest evolution of the Corvette available to mortals. Boasting a monstrous 427-ci iron V8 with aluminum heads, a close-ratio racing transmission, and racetrack-calibrated suspension, it was the boldest, brashest, most authoritative mass-produced car you could buy (not including low-production cars like the Cobra, of course). Even 40 years later, among Corvette disciples the name L88 still commands all the respect afforded to a priest’s smoking thurible at Saturday-evening mass. And a hell of a lot more guys will talk about the tire-smoking L88 they saw on the way home. Or on an empty western highway sometime in late 1967.
“The only time all three cars ever drove together was on the highway from St. Louis to L.A.,” Guldstrand recalls with a sparkle in his eye. “I can remember that like it was stamped in my brain. We put little tufts on the cars and got up close to each other to see how they would react at speed. We had to be going 130 to 140 nose-to-tail and we passed a cop. He looked up and then looked down again real fast—he didn’t want anything to do with us. We were clear out of control.”
From 1967 to 1969, GM’s St. Louis plant turned out 216 Corvette L88s in both C2 (1967) and C3 (1968–69) configurations. Articles and books about the L88 have fanned the flames ever since, but in the final analysis it’s really the deed that determines the legend, and the L88 decidedly backed up the hype that flacks and hacks put to paper about Chevrolet’s big-block ground-pounder. As Guldstrand discovered when he took a ’67 L88 to Le Mans in 1967, “You sure found out if you were going to be a great driver or a candy ass in one lap.”
The uniquely powerful and phallic design of the 1968 Corvette, together with the L88’s huge engine, enormous street credibility and genuinely terrorizing performance, had a dramatic effect on enthusiasts back in 1968 that is still vibrant and valid today. So was this car worth the cash? Plastic fantastic flyer though it may be, the Garner AIR L88 is easily aligned with the times in terms of celebrity value, and unlike an otherwise useless Von Dutch helmet with a rubber nipple on the top, the new owner of this car, for the price of a Palm Beach condo, can likely gain entrance to top vintage events anywhere in the U.S. or Europe—and have the time of his life driving in them in a car with genuine star power. Viewed in these terms, it was indeed a bargain
