First C8 Corvette Grabs $3 Million at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Auction

$3 million is the tally, translating to 2.7 million euros. A well-equipped ‘Vette with the Z51 package and 3LT equipment group will set you back $80,000 or thereabouts, which goes to show that bidding can get crazy sometimes. So what happens with all that money?

100 percent of the hammer price is going to The Detroit Children’s Fund, an NGO that improves the quality of schooling in Detroit through targeted investments. It should be mentioned, however, that the red car auctioned in Scottsdale is “representative of the actual vehicle.”

The specification the future owner has agreed upon is 3LT with pretty much every option you could imagine. Black paintwork, black upholstery for the GT2 seats, red garnish here and there, upgraded roof panel and rear spoiler, and performance data recorder are just a few of the highlights.

Rick Hendrick is the winning bidder, the man who has also bought the first-ever Acura NSX from the second generation, C7 Corvette Z06, and Toyota GR Supra. In the latter’s case, the NASCAR team owner paid $2.1 million for a BMW Z4 in disguise that’s manufactured in Austria.

Thanks to the sports exhaust system of the Z51 package, the Stingray he bought features 495 horsepower and 470 pound-feet of torque at the crankshaft. LT2 is the codename of the small-block V8 with 6.2 liters of displacement, an evolution of the LT1 utilized by the C7 Corvette Stingray.

The manual transmission, however, had to go. Chevy developed the C8 right off the bat with a dual-clutch box, meant to improve performance as well as efficiency. The DCT should be carried over by whatever the Z06 and ZR1 will be called for the eighth-generation Corvette, even by the widely-anticipated hybrid drivetrain option that some refer to as the Corvette e-Ray.