Past Cars
Fourplay – My fourth Corvette, and second convertible. It has the awesome limited-edition Grand Sport LT4 V8 engine (330hp) backed by a 6-speed ZF S6-40 transmission and Dana D44 3.45 limited-slip differential. It rides on the F45 adjustable electronic suspension. Its color is the much-loved Polo Green II metallic with a new black soft top, matching color hardtop, and saddle leather interior. According to the official LT4 production numbers, there were only 20 cars originally built this way – and that’s not an artificially small number based on weird option combinations nobody cares about – just the convertible, LT4 engine, 6-speed transmission, F45 suspension, and color.
Additions include red Z06 brakes and 18″ 2009 Z06 Motorsport wheels with massive Michelin Pilot Sport tires, and a new black convertible top. This is my crazy powersliding grin-generating torque monster. It loves to smoke its tires and scorch black rubber streaks into the pavement at the slightest overstep on the loud pedal. Driving it with the traction control disabled is not for those lacking in driving skill – particularly in the rain.
The seeds of this acquisition were sown in 2000, when I was at Quality Corvettes one spring day with a fellow enthusiast. We’d gone to hang out on a Saturday afternoon and look over the inventory, but we inadvertently managed to sell a white 1992 six-speed coupe to a customer while we were there. I had been eyeing a ’94 polo green LT1 automatic convertible out on the lot, and asked to take it for a spin in exchange for the sale. I fell irreversibly in love with convertibles on that day.
This was the second of my “Aspirational” cars – a replacement for a past car (or cars) that I really liked but wished they were optioned just slightly differently. This one replaced MegaZ and Bulldozer, both of which I wished had six-speed gearboxes and open tops. It is the perfect combination of all that I loved about those cars and wished they could’ve been. Acquired April 2005 on eBay, this car was a reposession from Honolulu, Hawaii that I bought through a dealer in Phoenix AZ, and shipped to my home in Chicago in a nail-biting two week ordeal.
Fourplay was added to my collection in Summer 2004 and has had nowhere near the adventures of its stablemates. The best one, though, was the time I spent the night in it in a rough part of Chicago back in the summer of 2005 after drinking to excess, and awakening to three hookers tapping on the windshield at 5am. I drove it 2100 miles across the country from Illinois to Washington in May 2006 in a marathon 2-1/2 day run, much of which with the top down. After acquiring a hardtop for it in February 2007 from a seller in Arkansas, I moved the hardtop across the country with the GTP and installed it in April 2007.
Fourplay had been plotting how it was going to kill me for years, and was destroyed in a freak “money-shift” 4-1 crash where it nearly succeeded in August 2011. It was stripped down for parts in 2012 and the chassis scrapped in 2017.