Ohio Dealer’s White Whale is a Red C6RS

With just seven built, the C6RS is the ultimate high-performance C6 Corvette.

Doug Tabbutt runs Switchcars, a dealership in Northeast Ohio that specializes in, well, the sort of cars we care about. You won’t find any CR-Vs or Malibus there, but you will find the rarest of the rare when it comes to sports and exotic cars.

In the above VINwiki video, Tabbutt shares his personal history of the mega-rare Pratt & Miller-developed Corvette C6RS. For context, Switchcars wasn’t always in Ohio. A decade or so ago, Tabbutt’s dealership called Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch home.

Tabbutt called it a “destination dealership,” located on the grounds of the racetrack and country club. One of the events hosted at Spring Mountain is the Ron Fellows Performance Driving School. When he visited the facility, Tabbutt was excited to have the opportunity to meet one of his racing heroes.

As Tabbutt tells it, the owner of Spring Mountain was a fan of racquetball and had a court built. Occasionally, he would rope Ron Fellows into playing with him and Tabbutt.

Tabbutt says, “He was terrible at racquetball, but like racing, he would give it his all. He would play with intensity.” He takes great pride in being able to say that Fellows hit him in the face multiple times.

Chasing the C6RS

By now, you know that Pratt & Miller built the C6.R race cars that Fellows and many others drove to victory around the world. At the time, their passion project was the C6RS, a high-power, high-tech, high-dollar C6 that went above and beyond the capabilities of even the mighty ZR1.

At a cost of around a quarter of a million dollars, just seven were built. Tabbutt was lucky enough to have driven three of the seven cars built. As he says, “To date, that is one of the best cars I’ve ever driven.”

As luck would have it, Tabbutt would eventually get a chance to own one of these race machines. A black one was apparently purchased by GoDaddy.com founder Bob Parsons, who promptly forgot about it. It was sold, and Tabbutt was the buyer. He got to enjoy the car a little bit before re-selling it to one of his customers at Switchcars.

One of the three he got to drive, a red one, popped up for sale. Tabbutt knew the owner and saw him frequently around Spring Mountain with what he assumed was his wife. As it turns out, there is a lot to do in Pahrump, Nevada besides race cars and play racquetball.

As it happens, that guy’s now ex-wife won the C6RS in the divorce and was looking to sell. However, given Tabbutt’s relationship to her ex-husband, she refused to sell the car to him, and instead sold it to someone else.

Years later, Tabbutt would find himself on the hunt again, wanting another chance at driving a C6RS. He ended up discovering that the red car was in Ohio, but he hasn’t tracked the owner down yet. “I’ve got this whole backstory with it, and I’d love to have it again.” He adds, “I’m still on the hunt.”

.