Jay Leno Calls C5 Corvette the Performance Bargain of the Century

Not that we don’t already know the C5 Corvette is a fantastic buy, but it’s nice to get confirmation from a great collector.

Legendary comedian Jay Leno is also one of the world’s most renowned car collectors, a man whose collection spans the entire spectrum of automotive history. Needless to say, Leno has also driven just about every kind of automobile ever produced, so he knows a thing or two about this kind of stuff. So when he calls the C5 Corvette “the performance bargain of the century” in this recent episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, it truly means something.

Of course, this isn’t really news to Corvette fans, who have long been scooping up C5 Corvette examples on the cheap and building them into seriously competitive autocross, track, and drag racing machines. Regardless, Leno is broadcasting this bit of information to the masses here, which may or may not be a good thing for the future values of these cars.

“The genius in this car is that it’s not the fact that they can build it for the price that they do,” Leno says. “All the excitement of driving and handling you get in fancier cars for just about a tenth of the price, if not less than that.” The subject of this particular episode is a seriously clean 1999 Corvette, which just so happens to be the same year Leno got to drive the pace car version at the Indianapolis 500.

What’s particularly interesting about this car is that it was gifted to Leno. After a number of other celebrities turned down the opportunity to pilot the pace car that year, Leno offered to do it for free. When GM asked if there was anything it could do for him, he simply responded “well, I like to get paid in product.” Next thing you know, this demo car, which had 2,500 miles on it at the time, was his.

Today, all these years later, Leno still owns and loves his C5 Corvette. And he truly believes that it’s a car every enthusiast should run out and buy. “You can buy these now for between $15 and $20 grand,” he says. “And it’s the greatest performance bargain there is for the money. I mean, this has as much power, if not more, than the equivalent Aston Martin in period, or even the two-seater Ferraris. And yet, this was something that was bulletproof – it just runs and runs.”

Now that any of this is news to us, of course, but it’s nice to get a little bit of validation, as well as take a stroll down memory lane, with one of the great car collectors of our time.

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