No short cuts. No quick fixes. The painstaking, zero timed, concours condition restoration of John G Van Meewuen’s 1963 Corvette Sting Ray to its original Riverside Red glory is something to behold and all because of the remarkable attention to detail.
Choosing whether to restore or resto-mod an older corvette isn’t always easy. While wrestling with the merits of bringing back an original versus tampering with a classic, the final decision might depend on several factors. Often it’s dictated by the condition and history of the vehicle. After considering his options on a dilapidated ’63 split window, John Daniels’ direction was fairly obvious. Through his friend John Vestri of Vestri’s Vettes, a firm specializing in resurrecting non-original donor corvettes, he’d found a suitable project car in Arizona that had a good body and interior. But, the original running gear was gone, and a newer Chevy 350 crate engine was in the engine bay. lacking any numbers-matching parts, or any significant provenance, doing a resto-mod on this beleaguered corvette was basically a given.
