Why I bought my C5 Corvette? In 2018 after searching the West Coast for a suitable car, I settled on my 2001 C5 Convertible with a 6-speed manual transmission. I love my vette! I own 2 Porsche’s but the C5 is my favourite car to drive. It has lots of power, the open-air convertible is fantastic, and it looks great on the road. I have added a Corsa Sport Exhaust which makes it sound awesome and has given me a boost in power. In this video I will explain why I like it so much and show you how my C5 Corvette looks driving down the road. Even at close to 20 years old, the car gets lots of attention. While filming this segment I came across a glamour photoshoot and they asked to use the car as a prop. That explains the thumbnail for this video.
Video Transcript:
Hi folks and welcome to Center Lane, I'm Bruce Hitchen. Today I'm going to tell you about my C5 Corvette. Now I mentioned in my very first episode how much I love the C5. Um it's not a car that I was always, had a desire to own um I was, you know, more of a Porsche guy growing up. I thought European cars were great. There was a bit of an attitude in my household that American cars were kind of substandard. But this really has turned out to be my favorite car. I like the fact that it is a convertible, I like the fact that it's a stick, I think it looks beautiful, it's a great color. I'm going to tell you more about that tory, we'll take this car for a drive and I'll tell you about how I ended up with it. But before we do that I want to remind you to subscribe to my channel and click the link below so you'll be notified of any future editions. It really is hard to beat the look of a C5 especially in this color. I get so many comments on this car every time I take it out. I get people driving by me and giving me the thumbs up, um I always have people saying how pretty it is. So let's take it out for a drive and I'll tell you more about the story.
So I'm in my Corvette, like I say, this is just a really nice ride. I really like the fact that it's very, uh feels very good, um the ride is relatively smooth for a sports car, um and just the power that this car has it's really quite something. It was never really a big thing for me to have a Corvette you know, I mean there was a lot of young guys that really thought they were the coolest cars in the world...um Corvette was never really on my list of cars I wanted to get. And it wasn't for a long time, you know it was only after I had bought the, the Porsche 928 and I was actually in the process of buying my 944 and I had searched for the Porsche 944 all
over, sort of, North America to find a really good one. And I'd made a deal on it but it looked like that deal wasn't going to go through and because of that I was kind of disappointed but at the same time I thought well maybe I can see what other kind of car I might be interested in. And I started scouring the ads and um looking at different cars and then I, you know, saw a C5 and I thought, god that's a beautiful looking car. And um that's really what got me interested in Corvettes. Well I ended up getting my 944 and I was, I thought, oh I'll give up on the Corvette but it was only six or eight months later that the bug got me once again and I found myself looking through the ads and seeing what Corvettes were available out there. And and uh I really found, because I'm in British Columbia, you know if I opened up my search and looked into California and Arizona that there was just so many more cars available and especially since I was looking for a convertible uh there was a lot more convertibles down there. So I found the Corvette in Phoenix. My wife and I got on a plane flew down there, uh looked at the car, picked it up, drove it home and I just I sort of fell in love with the car.
I really, I kind of thought that I would buy it and have it for a few months and then it would be one of those things that I would sort of check off my bucket list. It was a car that I would have had and had my fun with it and uh moved on. But now I've got a few cars and if I was gonna sell one of them it wouldn't be the Corvette. The only reason I would sell the Corvette is to buy another Corvette.
It's incredibly reliable. I have really no issues with this car at all. And I haven't done much to it. I mean I've put a new steering this new steering wheel on it which I think is a huge improvement, um I changed the shifter because I never liked the C5 shifter. It was, sort of seemed like an oversized almost squarish kind of shape um I just put an aftermarket shifter on it. And I put this uh wind deflector on it which is makes it nice because actually right now I'm recording this video, I've got my my side windows up and with this wind deflector it's uh, it's pretty calm in here. Not a lot of wind.
And then when I was at the Corvette Caravan, I was down in Bowling Green last year at the uh the National Corvette Museum and when they do the Caravan they have a lot of vendors there and I put an exhaust system, a Corsa exhaust system on this car. And uh that is by far the best upgrade I've ever made to any car. Not only does it sound just fantastic, you can sort of hear it bobble along there but um it just gave me a real boost in horsepower, it felt like I gained, I think they say you gain 19 horsepower and usually they say that and you never notice the difference. This is an upgrade I really noticed the difference. Just feels more torquey, more powerful and like I say, it's got that really nice sound to it.
Once I got the car home I uh joined the BC Corvette Club uh and that was a good a good way to sort of get, you know, touch base with other people that had similar cars. Very sort of like-minded people. You know it's a lot of people like myself. Most Corvette owners are over 50 years old. I think they say the average Corvette owner is 58 and that might be a little bit low. But you know it's either people that have loved Corvettes their whole lives and always had one or it's people that always wanted one and could never afford it and finally they didn't have a mortgage anymore and they didn't have kids at home and they bought a Corvette. So with me, my story is a little bit different, like I say, it was never something that I dreamed about um but I'm sure glad I ended up getting it.
But part of it is just that American muscle, um American muscle car there's nothing like it. That, that very torquey, pushrod V8 is a very nice feeling. Um you know the C5 is a pretty sophisticated car too, you know in its design and its weight distribution. It handles very well.
And it's really comfortable to drive. We drove it all the way to Bowling Green, Kentucky and I never felt fatigued driving this car.
You know one thing that these C5 Corvettes were always sort of criticized for was cheap interiors. They always said they had cheap interiors but I have to say, I mean this car is uh it's a 2001 it's 19 years old and um you know it's it's like a brand new car in here. It's held together really well. Um yeah maybe the the materials, the feel of them is not what you would find in sort of a BMW or an Audi or something like that but uh it's lasted and it still looks good. And I look at this car and I think, this is pretty nice. Like, it's got a nice instrument cluster, it's got a nice layout, um it's a great car.
Well that's my story on the C5 Corvette, how I got mine, why I love it so much. If you have a
C5 and you want to tell me about why, what you like so much about yours then leave a comment down below and let me know. Um thanks for watching, be sure to subscribe to my channel, click the bell if you want to be notified and we'll see you next time on Center Lane.