This Lifted C5 Corvette Is One of the Greatest Things I Have Ever Seen
Image: Caleb Hodshire Facebook
Have you ever seen a car that was legitimately so stupid, absurd, and cool it’s like time came to a standstill when you saw it? That’s what happened to me and a lot of the Jalopnik staff here when we laid eyes on this beauty: a Chevy Corvette with a whole lift kit and off-road tires.
Image: Caleb Hodshire Facebook
Specifically, it’s a 1999 Chevy Corvette C5 complete with Z71 off-road decals. Look how glorious this thing is. Wonderful things came together to make to create something new and special. Like buffalo sauce and chicken wings, or peanut butter and chocolate. For sale on Facebook Marketplace, the seller is asking just $8,500 for this thing.
Apparently, the owner has a history of doing stuff like this as he mentions in the listing if people remember a lifted Corvette C4 he did along with a picture of it. So I would assume that this guy knows what he’s doing. And it’s apparent by looking at the C5. It doesn’t look like some country backroads chop job. Care was taken to modify this thing. And he documented it on Youtube.
The C5 Off-Road Corvette
The seller says that the C5 has a four-inch lift and rides on 33-inch Nitto Ridge Grappler tires, which aren’t cheap. A set of them can easily run over $1,000. What’s interesting is that the tires themselves, along with their lug pattern, are actually for a Jeep Wrangler.
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To achieve the lift, the owner fitted a rubber block over the Corvette’s leaf spring suspension. At least at first. He says that this resulted in a two-inch front lift and just over two and a half inches in the rear. With how huge the tires are, he also had to cut into the fenders and wheel wells of the C5 so that the tires would actually fit in and have some clearance. But when he actually got the tires onto the thing, he wasn’t able to steer it. So he threw on a set of coil-over springs. He ran into a bit of trouble with fitting the coil overs on the front as far as alignment. But he eventually got it right.
While those huge tires cut into the car’s straight-line performance, (he clocked a 0-60 mph time of 6.7 seconds, and depending on what you read, the original C5 ran to 60 mph in 4.8 – 5.1 seconds; it’s definitely slower but still decently quick), the end result is wild shit: A Corvette you can do burnouts with on pavement and one that you can ford a small river or a stream with. Or even tackle some dirt road.
If you’re wondering, the listing is still up as of this posting. So someone go buy this thing because I can’t. I’m sad I don’t have the space for it. If I did, it would’ve been in my driveway yesterday.
