3 Sales That Caught Our Eye from the VanDerBrink Corvette Hoard

Last weekend, VanDerBrink Auctions hosted a sale of Corvettes and Corvette parts that Bill Slavens accumulated over a lifetime of collecting. The hoarded cars and parts included Corvettes from 1953 and 1963, lots of C3s, some C4s, and rare manifolds from some of the most desirable C1 and C2 Fuelies.

Restorers looking to return their mechanical-fuel-injected cars with original parts had more than a dozen lots to choose from, most of which included complete fuel injection manifolds. Another highlight included a 3×2 427 manifold complete with Holley carbs and the trademark triangular air cleaner.

Drool though we do over those cool Rochester units, we gravitated to three lots in particular, each of which stood out for very different reasons. Here are the auctions that we followed most closely, but check out the listing and see what other excellent buys were made.

1963 Chevrolet Corvette coupe

Hammer price: $134,000

This Ermine White 1963 Corvette Sting Ray is equipped with air conditioning, a rather rare option with fewer than 300 examples built for 1963. The coupe retains its numbers matching 300hp L75 327 V-8 and is paired with a Powerglide automatic transmission. Pulled from storage where it sat for more than 40 years, the coupe will require some serious cleaning and the brightwork on the engine shows the effects of prolonged storage. That said, it’s a pretty complete car and brings lots of its original parts as well as desirable options including power steering, power windows, and the aforementioned A/C. Its hammer price of $134,000 puts it above its current #3 (Good) value of $122,000.

1972 Chevrolet Corvette Coupe

Hammer price: $11,500

Several chrome-bumper C3s were sold for project car prices at this VanDerBrink auction, but they were legitimate project cars—most of them didn’t run and several had sat long enough that the brakes were locked up. Still, they made for tempting buys considering that the Corvette tax doesn’t really apply to generic small-block parts and any ol’ Chevy V-8 would do the trick for most of us.

This 1972 Corvette, originally Ontario Orange, looks like it cleaned up rather nicely. Despite sitting for quite some time, its repainted red shone after the dust was knocked off. This is a 350-powered automatic car with air conditioning, however, the engine casting number, 14016379, shows it’s not the car’s original small block. For those that want to work on something and have a fun weekend driver, a numbers-matching engine might not matter much. The price came in about half its #3 (Good) value and $5,000 under the current #4(Fair) value for an L42 1972 Stingray. A $5,000 parts and detailing budget would go quite a long way to getting this car into weekend cruiser shape.

1963 Chevrolet Corvette split-window roof section

Hammer price: $3600

We’re trying to figure out how this scalped 1963 Corvette coupe came to be. We hope that it came from a wrecked car and the rest of the body was also parted out, because we’d hate to imagine the alternative. This piece of an unfortunate 1963 Corvette coupe is probably the closest a lot of us could realistically get to owning a real split-window, and one of the Hagerty media staff was already scheming how they’d mount the fiberglass on the wall of their office. We’d like to know the fate of this piece, because as much as we’d like to hang it on the wall, it would be interesting if it made its way onto a damaged 1963 to put this piece of Chevy fiberglass back on the road.