There was a time when I actively disliked the lines of the C3, but that's softened over the years. I've warmed up to them rather a lot, but I think it's the body style easiest to ruin with aftermarket bodywork. This clean, stock model from...well, 1970-'72, somewhere in there...is rather attractive, but sticking spoilers and such on them inevitably winds you up in Corvette Summer territory, and nobody wants to go there. Nobody who's sane and has good taste, anyway.
Part of my mixed feelings might also come from the fact that the C3 straddled two eras.
The earliest ones were right at the peak of the muscle car era, with an array of ferocious big block options and capable of blistering acceleration, but the tail end of the body style saw such ignominies as a 305 cubic inch motor for California cars, smog motor 350s with sub-200bhp output, and the final model year saw the debut of the baroque Crossfire Injection setup.
For most of the later '70s, stock Corvettes struggled to break into the 14's in the quarter and turned in 0-60 times in the sevens, but then again, pretty much everything was slow from '75-'85. Those were dark times for horsepower fans.
