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 . . .
fact is, the rumour is not quite as simple as that. Despite commonly held notions, if one takes an indirect look at history, one might stress that Chevrolet, not Ford, actually introduced the small, personal sport coupe or “ponycar” and that Ford was the company that was playing catch-up when it introduced the Mustang.
The concept of a extremely styled, civilized pickup truck was definitely not new when the El Camino was introduced to the public in the 1959 model year, and it turned out that the ’59 Camino was more an artistic triumph than a commercial triumph, but that does not diminish the importance of the vehicle. After getting its second chance, it produced a line that would extend for 25 years.
And then imagine that the version that resulted from that joke–the