Pre-Production Corvette C8.R Championship Edition Goes up for Auction

This Corvette C8.R Championship Edition model was on display at numerous races and in GM’s 2022 brochure.

We’ve seen our fair share of cool, unique, rare, and notable Corvette auctions over the years, featuring all sorts of interesting cars. Every so often, that includes pre-production examples, though most of those never escape the confines of General Motors. However, this pre-production Corvette C8.R Championship Edition up for grabs at Bring a Trailer did, and now, it’s presenting us with a pretty rare opportunity to own a car that’s somewhat famous as well.

According to the seller, this Corvette C8.R Championship Edition model was used as a promotional vehicle for that particular offering, and was on display at the 2021 Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta, the 6 Hours of the Glen, the Detroit Grand Prix, and was also featured in the 2022 Chevrolet Corvette C8.R brochure, making it a pretty notable and cool find that wound up being sold to a dealer back in July.

On the outside, this cool auction find is finished in Accelerate Yellow Metallic with Carbon Flash and Midnight Silver stinger stripes on the hood, as well as a Carbon Flash-painted high-wing spoiler, front splitter, rocker accents, and mirrors. The car rolls on a set of black 19- and 20-inch Trident wheels wrapped with Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires, and it’s also equipped with the Z51 Performance Package to boot.

Inside the cabin, you’ll find Competition Sport bucket seats wrapped with black leather and Sky Cool Gray fabric along with Strike Yellow accents and yellow stitching, a host of premium features including the 14-speaker Bose Performance Series audio system, and something that touts how unique this C8 truly is – a C8.R Edition plaque mounted between the seats engraved with the serial number 01EX.

Like all C8 Stingrays, power for this pre-production model comes from GM’s LT2 V8, which produces 495 horsepower and 470 pound-feet of torque an is mated to an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission and an electronic limited-slip differential. This particular car has just 97 miles on the clock, so it’s essentially brand new, and it comes with a replacement set of C8.R graphics to boot. Given how much money regular C8s are still trading for, it’s hard to say what this special package might ultimately hammer for, but it has already reached the high $80k mark after just a couple of days, so the sky seems to be the limit in this case.

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Photos:Bring a Trailer