Corvettes on eBay: 1989 Corvette Challenge Race Car

May 31, 2018

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Corvettes on eBay: 1989 Corvette Challenge Race Car

A piece of Corvette racing history is up for sale on eBay through Sunday – one of 30 factory-built 1989 Corvette Challenge Race Cars.

This car – #42 – competed in all 12 of the 1989 races with Randy Ruhlman behind the wheel, completing all of the races and finishing as high as fourth at St. Pete and 10th at Des Moines.

Mike Yager of Mid America Motorworks purchased the car at the end of the last race, putting it on display at his museum until recently.

Now the new owner has it

Why a Corvette Challenge in the first place? Well, the C4 Corvettes were so good back in the ‘80s that they won every Sports Car Club of America Showroom Stock GT race they competed in. By 1987, other manufacturers had had enough and SCCA officials wouldn’t invite Corvettes for the 1988 season. That’s when John Powell came up with the idea of having a series where identical Corvettes would compete against each other. Who needs those other makes anyhow?

Powell – himself a successful Corvette racer, operator of one of Canada’s leading competition driving schools and creator of the Player’s Cup, a Canadian series for Camaros and Firebirds – quickly gathered support from other Corvette drivers and entrants and proposed the Corvette Challenge to the SCCA to take advantage of the car’s popularity with both entrants and fans. Yager and his Mid America Motorworks threw their weight behind the series, helping lure Goodyear and Exxon to the party. With so much interest growing, GM gave its blessing, too.

Each of the 1989 Corvette Challenge cars that were converted by Powell were designated strictly for racing, with specially installed roll cage, fire system, Challenge car seats, seat belts, brake ducts, exhaust system, oil cooler and Dymag wheels. All had the new ZF six-speed manual transmission, and a new adjustable suspension system, Option RPO FX3, that allowed three variations of suspension control, regulated by a console switch.

The purse was a cool $1 million, an unheard of amount at the time, and the series instantly became a hit with spectators and teams, with ESPN even broadcasting the full season on TV in 1989.

That was to be the end of the line for the Corvette Challenge, though, as competing companies felt they had improved enough to compete with Corvettes by then, and SCCA invited Corvette into its new World Challenge series for 1990.

Today, these Corvette Challenge cars are some of the most desirable collectibles of the C4 era. It’s easy to identify true Corvette Challenge cars because they had a unique option code from the factory – R7F.