Arky

I'm in the early planning (read: daydreaming) stages for building a dedicated track car. If things fall into place this year the plan would be to purchase something this fall, prep it over the winter, and start doing HPDE for the 2020 season. I was particularly inspired by Smokey The Talon's track FD build thread here.

I've always loved FDs and I think they've aged particularly well. Probably not the absolute best choice for a dedicated track car, but I could scratch the itch of owning one AND start learning to drive on the track. Two birds with one stone.

The problem is how difficult they are to come by. Cars.com currently has 9 listed, and the two that have less than 50K miles on them are asking pretty silly money.

On the other hand, the C5 Corvette Z06 is a whole other story. There are 126 listed for sale, 82 of which have less than 50K miles. There's one less than half an hour away with 20K miles for about $20K.

At first I thought it was purely about production numbers, but it seems like they produced around 33K of the Z06s, compared to maybe 14K FDs for North America. You'd think there would be more like 50 FDs for sale on the same web site. I'm sure age is a factor, the average age of an FD is almost 10 years older than a C5, but I don't know if that is enough to explain the gap.

So what are the prevailing theories about FD scarcity? Is it simply too late to find a clean, low-mileage example for reasonable money?