15 Manliest Cars On The Road

7. Chevrolet Corvette C2

No other manly car on this top 15 list has been in production as long as the Corvette, and few ‘Vettes have a hard time living up to the manly car specs.

The 1953-’54 cars are excused from this discussion, and some odd color options on the C4 of ’84-’96 dilute the manliness.

The manliest is the C2 Sting Ray of ’63-’67. Some see a Sting Ray and think “phallic symbol on four wheels.” Others attribute the manliness to its road manner, which doesn’t suffer fools.

Whatever it is, things weren’t quite the same when the Sting Ray designation took a year off for the ’68 redesign and returned as the “Stingray” in ’69.

By the early 1960s, the Corvette had triumphed over the Thunderbird and was now firmly America’s sports car for the second-gen’s arrival as a 1963 model.

Car guys, pilots and engineers all over America had taken the lightweight-big engine formula to heart with their prized first-gen Corvettes , but now they wanted more performance by every measurement. Much more speed, in particular.

Chevrolet had similar ideas when brainstorming ways to replace the C1 as far back as 1957. The Q-Corvette concept was a working idea of a smaller, lighter and nimbler Corvette than ever before. Four-wheel discs were to be standard, and the car was could hold its own on a racetrack right off the showroom floor.

Over the C2’s relatively short time — until 1967 — this Corvette became the quickest factory machine ever in the quarter-mile with the 11.02 second time recorded by the 1967 Corvette L88 Sting Ray Convertible.