Big Green Monster: This LS6 Corvette Was All the Money

Chevrolet has always had a knack for building a Corvette for everyone. That’s the benefit of being so ginormous, with production capacities so immense that you can give customers the choice of a half-dozen or so powerplants, from low-output small-blocks to high-output big-blocks, and everything in between. In other words, do you take your Corvette fast, faster, or fastest?

Chevy’s Corvette offerings for 1971 followed this recipe, with 350-cid V-8s churning out 270 and 330 horses and 454-cid V-8s making 365 and 425 horses. The base 270-hp mill was available in every Chevy model on the lot except the Vega. The more frenetic, solid-lifter, 330-hp LT1, meanwhile, seemed in keeping with the Corvette’s notable past small-block mills, though for 1971, as the shift from leaded to unleaded fuels loomed and emissions engineers weighed in, Chevy dropped the compression from 11.25:1 to 9.0:1. 

The two big-blocks, RPO LS5 and LS6, were also detuned versions of their former selves but they were no pushovers. The latter, especially. The one-year-only LS6 differed in big ways from the less-powerful LS5 by employing aluminum heads (which saved 55 pounds), a Holley carb, a solid-lifter cam, and forged pistons, among other heavy-duty goodies. In practice, that translated to a quarter-mile pass of 13.8 seconds at 104.65 mph, according to a June 1971 test in Car and Driver. 

The top engine also cost a heckuva lot more: The LS5 was a $295 option on the standard Corvette coupe’s $5496 base price, and more than 5000 buyers plunked one into the engine bay of their new car. The LS6 added $1221 to the price, and as result, just 188 Corvettes came so equipped. 

The Brands Hatch Green T-top coupe seen here happens to be one such car, and this week it sold on Hagerty Marketplace for $125,190, including fees. 

The car retains its original, matching-numbers LS6 V-8 as well as its original M22 “rock crusher” close-ratio four-speed gearbox, and in 2010 it was twice given the Top Flight award by the National Corvette Restorers Society (NCRS) after receiving at least 94 percent of the available 4500 points in NCRS judging for its originality. 

Based on the many photos and the description, the car’s price falls solidly in the range of #3+ (good) or #2- (excellent) condition, and the sale price perfectly reflects that. (By comparison, and to illustrate the LS6’s rarity, a comparable 1971 LS5 Corvette coupe might have brought about $40,000.)

This Corvette has been in its current ownership for 13 years, which might indicate that the owner before them put in the work to have the car restored and judged, then sold it at the height of its perfection. Then the next one enjoyed it for a decade-plus. Given that the car’s value hovered somewhere around $100K back in 2011, when presumably it would have been in excellent-or-better shape, the small profit achieved here (minus the cost of ownership, obviously) is a nice reward for keeping this Corvette in such fine fettle.