There are instances when a car’s legend is out of all proportion to its impact on the marketplace. 
So it is with the 1969 ZL-1-furnished Chevrolet Corvette. Over the years, the ZL-1 has taken on mythic proportions as a car and as an objet d’art. One recent retrospective on the car asserted that it had a top speed of 200 miles per hour. Another suggests that it could dash through the quarter mile in just 10 seconds. And though there is a temptation to foster the legend by repeating statistics as fact, the fact is that, while the ZL-1 Corvette was a formidable street performance car, it was not capable of accomplishing either of those numbers. Damn few street cars of any period are.
ZL-1 scarcity
Perhaps the biggest reason that the Corvette ZL-1 has achieved these mythic proportions is its sheer inaccessibility. By most accounts only two — yes, two — Corvettes with the ZL-1 engine were ever sold to the general public, and their history is cloudy and tangled. So while many have seen and actually driven a 1957 “fuelie” or a ’68 L88, real tests of box stock ZL-1-equipped Corvettes are rarer than the teeth of a rooster. Thus, in the absence of definite knowledge, legend has grown. Read more . . .
It tells you more about Maserati when you learn that one of the seven sons of Rodolfo and Carolina Maserati was named Alfieri, but when he passed away just months after his birth in 1885, his name was passed on to the next-born son, who came into this world in 1887. (With seven sons to his credit, Rodolfo Maserati was apparently a devotee of the song “Carolina in the Morning.”)
The 
While Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds set out to make cars for the “common man,” the Packard brothers, James Ward and William Doud, decided they would sell cars to men of uncommon richness. Their plan made sense because, before they had even built their first motorcar, the Packards themselves were gentlemen of substance.
Over the course of that era, the Dodge brothers split with Ford to begin building cars of their own under the imaginative Dodge Brothers name; Dodge Brothers was bought by Walter P. Chrysler as he built Chrysler Corporation in the image of his previous employer, General Motors; and Dodge (sans Brothers) went from an icon of performance during the halcyon years of the Sixties to becoming largely irrelevant by the late Eighties. Omnis and K-cars will do that, no matter how proud one’s history.