I am Bill McDonald from Franklin, Tenn. My father bought a new 1973 white t-top automatic Corvette and sold it six months later for $600 more than he paid for it. I was too young to drive then. In 1976 he picked up a used 1974 silver t-top automatic with the 454ci engine. I was 16 years old and driving this car to my high school! He traded it for a  1972 white automatic convertible with the 350ci engine and both tops. He later sold it and has not had a Corvette since. When I was driving the 74 Vette, he wanted it back and got me a brand new 1977 t-top Trans Am. It had some leakage problems and I traded it on a new 1978 4-speed Trans Am with the T/A 6.6 liter engine. I kept it for almost 10 years. At the end of 1997, I was sick of driving cars that had automatic transmissions, front wheel drive and equipped without V8 engines, so I ordered a WS6 (ram-air) bright red 1998 Trans Am with 6-speed. While I was waiting for the Trans Am, my dad suggested that I look at the Corvette (I had not even thought about Vettes since all the hype from the 1984 model). I studied the technical aspects of the car, looked at one up close and the car sold itself. I was really intrigued by the *fly-by-wire concept, since I am a software engineer. I had never ordered a car that I had not even sat in, but I could not keep from it. The Vette was only $12,000 more than the Trans Am, and I knew that it would hold its value much better than the Trans Am. So now I am a first time Vette owner! I sold this car to my brother-n-law in the spring of 2008.

*fly-by-wire is a fighter jet concept where the throttle is connected by electronics to a computer. There is not any mechanical linkage. The computer in a Corvette uses the distance the gas pedal is pressed and determines the amount of air and fuel to give the requested power with the best gas mileage and lowest emissions.

I am a life time member of the National Corvette Museum (NCM # 602)