Low-mile, 8.2-liter Pratt & Miller Corvette C6RS fetches $366,000
A very rare, very powerful Corvette just sold on Bring a Trailer for $366,099 including buyer’s premium. What makes this especially noteworthy is that the Vette in question is not a race-spec mid-year, or a big-block Stingray, but a C6. And while it doesn’t look like it at first glance, this car is far from stock. It’s a very special C6 built by Pratt & Miller as a tribute to the G6.R Corvettes that the race engineering firm built to battle the world’s best sports car endurance competition.
Oh, and it has an 8.2-liter V-8 with just 209 miles under its belt.
Like collector car nuts of many stripes, Corvette buyers can be sticklers for detail. Some demand perfection matching as close to factory-original accuracy and condition as possible, while others are more than willing to pay a premium for upgrades or modernization. As long as they’re done right, it turns out, that plenty of C2 Corvette buyers, will embrace even serious modifications.
Perhaps we shouldn’t really be comparing this rare, race car tribute to a restomod. Instead, think of this as a more modern version of those dealer-tuned cars from the ’60s when Baldwin-Motion and Royal Pontiac were churning out hot versions of muscle cars.
Wind your motorsports clock back about fifteen years. By 2007, the C6.R race car had seen more than its share of checkered flags, including a 1-2 finish in the GT1 class in the 2005 24 Hours of Le Mans and it also captured back-to-back American Le Mans GT1 championships during the 2005 and 2006 seasons (and would go on to make it a four-peat after winning in 2007 and 2008). A super street car built by the same shop that built the championship-winning racers seemed like a great match.
Rather than just add some racy-looking aero bits and some decals, Pratt & Miller made a host of performance modifications that are actually quite subtle but result in one of the best-looking C6s ever. At first glance, it seems like a rather standard Z06 with some tasteful center-lock BBS forged aluminum wheels, but the carbon-fiber fenders and quarter panels make it wider than even the wide-body Z06 by about 1.6 inches. Under those subtle wheels are Brembo brakes, 14 inches in the front and 13.5 inches in the rear.
Under the hood is where the C6RS really sets itself apart. The Vette hides it well, but that’s a 500-cubic-inch V-8 sitting behind its carbon-fiber air intake. The massive V-8 is rated at 600 hp and 600 lb-ft of torque. Those are impressive numbers even today, but especially when considering that the car is 15 years old. Keep in mind that the LS aftermarket has grown significantly in that time, and aftermarket heads and blocks have come a long way. Today, several manufacturers cast a tall-deck aluminum LS block, but in 2007 the options were a bit limited if your build called for much more than the 427 cubic inches offered by the factory LS7 block. The 500 cubic-inch Katech engine for the C6RS was built using a Dart billet aluminum block. That’s what it took to fit a whopping 4.5-inch stroke crank without compromising on connecting rod and piston geometry.
Just 7 of the proposed 25 C6RS models were actually built, so an example with such few miles on the odometer is special, indeed. When these were new they retailed for $250,000, which is $357,000 in today’s (inflated) currency. If anything, this sale shows there’s still a market a hot-rodded C6s—especially when they’re built by the shop that beat the world in GT endurance racing.
