and to attend a Corvette show in
Cottage Grove. “My ‘Tribute’ won six
awards at that show alone!” he smiles.
Then he returned to Oklahoma and
then set out for a trip to Corvettes at
Carlisle in Pennsylvania, and on to
Maryland to visit Mike Furman at
Criswell Chevrolet. It was there that
the marketing director saw the car and
asked if Jeremy would like to do an
interview about the car. The video link
in his email shows several times a day
in their dealership. After that, he was off
to see friends in Richmond, Virginia,
before heading to Bowling Green,
Kentucky, for the National Corvette
Museum’s Anniversary Celebration.
One more challenging incident has
to do with the trip Jeremy and his
wife, Gina, took in the car to Oregon
in August 2017. “As we left southern
Colorado and crossed over into Utah,
we were suddenly on a two-lane high-
way that had just been chip sealed and
the speed limit was 45 mph as a result,”
he recalls. Trucks coming in the oppo-
site direction were traveling the usual 65
mph and throwing the chip seal at his
custom-painted Corvette as they passed.
The front fascia took quite a few hits,
but the paint protection film did its job
for the most part. However, a few pen-
etrated the film and impacted the paint.
So when Jeremy took Tribute back to
Steve Ray this past winter, he had him
repaint the front fascia, too.
For all the customizing that Jeremy
had done to pay homage to the Penske
Grand Sport, a few comparisons
between the specs of the two cars are
intriguing. Both had a 6.2-liter V-8 (only
for a brief time on Penske’s, though,
as it went through multiple engines).
Even though the C7 Grand Sport boasts
460 horses, Penske’s engines delivered
anywhere from 360 to 500+ horses,
depending on the race and time period.
For improved engine respiration on
Jeremy’s Corvette, Corsa Performance
provided a double-helix X-pipe, and
finished off the exhaust system with
Extreme black chrome tips.
While they are in the same gen-
eral arena of horsepower, thepower-to-weight ratio differs substan-
tially, since the “Lightweight” tipped the
scales at only 1,980 pounds or so, due to
the use of paper-thin body panels and
a number of other weight-saving com-
ponents. Obviously, a production car is
burdened with all sorts of creature com-
forts and DOT-mandated baggage, so
Jeremy’s car has much more mass, com-
ing in about 1,500 pounds heavier.
Even so, his latest Grand Sport street
machine gives a good account of itself,
while the race version of the ’63 GS
was a hot mess on the track. So one is
a sophisticated and sure-footed run-
ner, while the other helped the Corvette
to make its bones. Together, they are
impressive statements about Corvette
performance. VETTE18 VETTE 19.
[FEATURE]
FITTING TRIBUTE