My Corvette Ride: The Last 1969 L88 Corvette Roadster

This 1969 Corvette is well documented and best known for being the last L88 Convertible made. VIN # 36083 was special ordered by a dentist hailing out of El Cajon, CA. The Monza Red Corvette was built in November 1969, the second to last month of 1969 model year production, and was delivered to Guaranty Chevrolet in San Diego, California.

Since then this L88 Convertible has been well cared for, earning a Survivor award at Bloomington in 2006. In 2008, the Corvette returned to St. Charles as part of the Bloomington Gold “L88 Invasion” Special Collection and also participated in GM’s 100 year anniversary celebration.

The L88 was a special high performance engine built during 1967-1969. To ensure the racing engine only showed up in cars destined for the track, GM artificially downgraded the horsepower from an estimated 560 hp down to 430 hp, 5 hp less than the L71 427/435 engine, and deleted creature comforts like heaters and radios. During that three year run, only 216 examples would be produced with 116 coming during the final year of 1969.

Like most of the standard L88 cars, the last ’69 L88 Corvette roadster came equipped with the special front and rear suspension (F41), special heavy duty brakes (J56), transistor ignition (K66) and the heavy duty close ratio 4 speed transmission (M22). Other options included an auxiliary hard top, tilt/tele steering column, the UA6 alarm system and speed warning indicator.

The Corvette has been detailed by Naber Brothers of Houston and MasterWorks in Detroit. Long time Corvette collector Tom Marcucci is the current owner.

My Corvette Ride

We are kicking off a new recurring feature called “My Corvette Ride” and we need to hear from you. Want to see your Corvette profiled on CorvetteBlogger.com? Send us the details of your Corvette and a quality photograph and we’ll contact you for more info if we decide to use it.

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Corvette | Vette | 1969 | C3 | Race | L88 | Engine | Bloomington Gold | Survivor | Roadster