Dream cars come in a variety of forms. Some are one-off, unobtainable show machines, while others are relatively easy-to-acquire vehicles found two towns over on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. Then there are the poster cars that adorned our bedroom walls when we were teenagers—scissor-door Lambos, Turbo Porsches, and fourth-generation Corvettes for those of us of a certain age. Though we often regard such automobiles as being forever be out of reach, the opportunity to acquire one many years later sometimes presents itself.
Maryland resident Ross Sober is four years younger than his oldest brother, and it was that fraternal bond that helped spark his affinity for America’s Sports Car. “I thought my brother was the coolest,” Sober told us during a photo shoot on his ’92 ZR-1 earlier this year. “When I was 12, I started reading his MotorTrend, Car and Driver, and Road & Track, and that’s where the car bug caught on.”
That was in 1986, and the aforementioned C4 quickly became the main object of Sober’s affection. “I used to sneak out of synagogue on Saturdays to walk across the street to the Chevy dealer and sit in
the Corvettes, push all the buttons, and move the power seats. Then, in 1988, they announced the ZR-1, and I read everything I could find on the car. I believed I would probably never see one in person, and would certainly never own one.”
Over the decades that followed, Sober’s life progressed in typical fashion—college, marriage, kids, and career, during which Chevrolet released ever more powerful Z-cars, up to and including the 755-hp C7 ZR1. Sober, however, never forgot the car crush of his teen years.
In 2019 that simmering lust for the original “Corvette from Hell” turned to a slow-rolling boil when Sober ran into a gentlemen with a pristine, 90,000-mile ’92 ZR-1. They talked at length, and the man eventually invited Sober to attend a get-together of C4 ZR-1 owners, where he had the opportunity to sit in and even drive his dream car. Sober ended up spending an ever-increasing amount of time with the group and absorbed everything he could about the ZR-1.
Not long after, COVID hit, and Sober found himself browsing car ads on the Internet. “I was sitting at home, drilling down on Facebook until [their algorithms] knew I was looking for ZR-1s. Then one popped up—a ’92. It was the worst listing you’ve ever seen.”
Sober sent the author a link to the ad, and it read as follows: Only 77k miles needs paint and tires but runs great interior nice too. Accompanying the minimalist description was a single photo of the car sitting in a driveway, dirty and surrounded by pine needles. Despite this, Sober immediately messaged the seller, who was asking a suspiciously low $9,000.
“When I responded to the gentleman [online], I could tell he was probably an older guy and definitely new to Facebook, because he was quite uncomfortable,” Sober related. “I asked if I could call him, he agreed, and we talked on the phone for two hours. He was the nicest guy. I PayPal’d him a deposit while we were on the phone. He had to get his wife’s phone and negotiate with her on how to receive PayPal. He was worried that it was a scam, which is completely understandable.”
Alas, as is the case with many Internet deals, the photo in the ad did not show the true condition of the car. “I took a friend and a trailer to pick up the car, and when we got to the guy’s house, it was way worse than I had imagined. It was dripping brake fluid and did not run very well. It had old, rock-hard tires and looked like a full baby diaper. That helped get the final sale price down to $7,500. It was probably the cheapest ZR-1 in the world.”
When Sober took the car home in May of 2020, COVID lockdowns were in full effect, so cleaning up the car, and especially its wretched interior, became a family project. Sober said the process was “very unifying.”
The first thing he, his wife, and their two boys tackled was the filthy, faded red interior. The elderly owner used to drive the Corvette but developed health problems and entrusted it to someone else. Unfortunately the car’s new steward was a smoker, which, according to Sober, imparted to the interior the look and smell of an ashtray.
To rectify this, the boys took the seats out and cleaned them with a motorized scrubber. Sober’s wife, meanwhile, shampooed the carpet three times, and each time the water was yellow. That prompted Sober to rip out the stock red interior and transform it into a two-tone black-and-tan cabin using Al Knoch pieces.
Once the inside of the car was completed, Sober took it to a ZR-1 meet to address the mechanicals, as he explained: “We took the intake plenum off and serviced all 16 injectors. We replaced the vacuum pump for the secondary system, the starter, coils, and plugs. I fixed the brake-fluid leak and changed the oil.”
After that the car ran better for a time. But when it “fell flat on its face” a year later under heavy throttle, Sober decided to send it to ZR-1 specialist Marc Haibeck in Illinois. Haibeck started the ZR-1 Net mailing list in 1997, opened a shop in the Chicago suburb of in Addison in 1999, and left his computer-programming career to work on ZR-1s full time in 2003. His son joined him the following year, and the pair continue to wrench on ZR-1s today.
Initially the plan was for Haibeck to simply give the car a good going-over and fix what wasn’t quite right. But then “project creep” reared its head, as Sober explained: “There were a lot of those ‘While you’re in there…’ moments along the way. I knew he was going to take the plenum off and [thought] it wouldn’t be much more money to get intake porting. Then it was [replacing] the exhaust manifolds with headers.”
According to Sober, one of the great things about the C4 ZR-1 community is how its members help each other out. “I put it out there that I was looking for headers, and a guy immediately popped up [with a pair for sale]. They were from Stainless Works, and Haibeck ceramic-coated them, which not only made them look great but helps under hood temps, too.”
Additional modifications included replacing the radiator and cooling fans and addressing a coolant leak. The internals of the LT5 remained stock, but the work that Haibeck did to the car extracted an additional 75 horsepower over the engine’s original 375. A few extra horses were also picked up when Sober replaced the existing exhaust with a Corsa cat-back system. With this extra grunt propelling Sober’s ZR-1 down the road, he made a drivability upgrade in the form of Genssi LED headlights.
But while these changes all made the ZR-1 a more enticing driving partner, they did not transform it into a glittering show machine. In fact, a friend of Sober’s who was visiting the Haibeck shop had no trouble identifying the car thanks to what he described as “all the patina.”
“It doesn’t have patina,” Sober replied with a laugh. “It has neglect and abuse because it was parked under a tree by a lake in Virginia for nine years.” But the friend’s offhand comment led Sober to apply for the license plate that is on the car today, and it was that plate that piqued the author’s interest enough to track Sober down through the Free State Corvette Club.
Sober related the story of the very tongue-in-cheek plate: “I immediately went to the MVA’s [Maryland Vehicle Administration] to get ‘PATINA,’ but it was already taken. So…I typed in every illicit thing I could think to see if I could get it past the state.
“I finally came up with ‘P0S ZR1’ because on Maryland license plates, there are no ‘Os’—they’re all zeros. Maryland interpreted the license plate as ‘P Zero S ZR1’…so it was accepted. I immediately put my money in and got the license plates on the way.”
When Sober finally took the car home from Haibeck, he realized that the “cheapest ZR-1 in the world” was turning out to be quite expensive. And when he decided to fit a “new” set of wheels he got for a steal, the project got even more so. When the author first photographed the car, it was wearing a set of custom Forgeline wheels. They were OEM sizes for the ZR-1—17 x 9.5 and 17 × 11 inches—wrapped in stock-sized Nitto NT555 G2 tires. Sober picked up the rims for a cool $500, but they ended up costing him $2,400.
“Two…had been damaged in an accident, which is why they were so cheap,” Sober explained. “I figured I’d drop them off at the wheel shop, they’d fix ‘em, and I’d have a $5,000 set of wheels for a thousand bucks.
“It didn’t work out that way. When I took the two bent ones to the shop, they said they couldn’t be fixed. So, for $2,400, Forgeline made me two brand-new wheels. It would have been cheaper to buy a set of nice wheels [to begin with], but then again, I wouldn’t have had this little adventure.”
Adventure notwithstanding, Sober did eventually decide to buy fresh rolling stock for the ZR-1. When the author met him for second round of photographs, the car wore a beautiful set of Kinesis K18 wheels—18x10 up front and 18×12 in the rear—shod with 295/35ZR18 and 335/35ZR18 Continental ExtremeContact Sport tires. (This is the setup shown in the action photos.)
Five years into his ownership, Sober has a ZR-1 that is mechanically safe, fairly reliable, and clean and comfortable on the inside. So when will he finally apply a fresh coat of Bright Red paint?
“Never,” Sober told us. “I refuse to paint it because it’s part of the car’s identity. Out of the almost 7,000 ZR-1s built between ’90 and ’95, this one is special because it’s [expletive deleted]. It’s the [expletive deleted] that allows me to drive it anywhere I want and not worry about it getting dinged or fret over losing NCRS points if I decide to make another modification.”
So what sort of reactions does this rough-and-tumble C4 receive from the public? “I get a lot of sympathy from people. They think I’m broke and can’t afford to paint the car.” Tellingly, a friend recently gave Sober a pile of rubber dog poop, which he told us makes a perfect hood ornament at shows.
Today, Sober admits he made mistakes along the way, especially in thinking that restoring a ’92 ZR-1 could be done on the cheap. The biggest lesson he learned—and one he’ll share with anyone looking to join the close-knit ZR-1 community—is that if you want a good car, you should pay the money for a prime example up front. It will ultimately be less expensive than buying a cheap one and fixing it.
Then again, the work that went into transforming the ZR-1 into something clean and drivable is what makes this such a compelling tale. “If I had a nice car, you and I probably would not be sitting across the table from each other, because there would be no story.”
It just goes to show that dream cars come in all forms, even when they are a piece of [expletive deleted].
