star car corvette 1984

                                                                     By: Patrick Smith

Make mine shiny black please, exactly 7,906 buyers wantd code 41 color Corvettes in 1984. Rick
Allen from Def Leppard was one of the lucky customers.
   There's something about rock stars and Corvettes that just seem to be a potent brew of trouble. So many have bought them and quite a few cars have met their demise in an untimely manner. In the early 1980s, there was no hotter rock band in the nation than Def Leppard. The English group had been riding high on the airwaves and in the auditoriums with their best selling album, Pyromania. It had the honor of placing seven hit songs on the charts. The band had been hard at work creating a follow up to this monster LP and took two weeks off for the Christmas holidays.
   While the band has been touring earlier in the year, Chevrolet Motors released the all new 1984 Corvette in March of 1983. Since it was emissions and federal regulatory compliant with 1984 standards, Chevrolet decided to issue it as a 1984 model with an early spring release. There was a very strong demand for the first new Corvette since 1968 so sales as you can imagine were white hot. One of the buyers was young Rick Allen, drummer for Def Leppard.

As no convertibles were available that year , Rick's car was a hardtop. This likely saved him
and Miriam from instant death as the car went over a stone wall and rolled several times.

    Rick's Corvette was finished in code 41 black paint with a hardtop body. His interior could have been gray, carmine or black. Unfortunately I do not know which color it was. A made for tv movie covering Def Leppard and Rick Allen's crash depicts a red interior automatic. It is inaccurate in many other critical details however so I doubt it's veracity.His engine was the L83 350 V8 sporting 205 horsepower and the four speed automatic transmission. If it was bought in England as an export model, it would've been the ZFH export engine. I haven't seen any pictures of Rick's car upright or in one piece. You see, it was in a terrible car crash.
   Aaah, you knew that was coming. Rick lost his Corvette in a horrible car wreck. What happened was during New Year's Evening, Rick and his girl friend Miriam Barendson were headed to a New Year's Eve party held in Rick's home town in Sheffield. He was driving his Corvette when an Alfa Romeo passed him. Apparently a bit of cat and mouse racing took place and in order to overtake the Alfa once and for all, Rick accelerated hard and didn't see a sharp turn in the road ahead until it was too late. The car went over a stone wall and flew upside down into a field. Rick's seat belt wasn't correctly fastened which tore his arm off at the shoulder blade as he was catapulted into a field. Miriam was fastened and she was suspended upside down in the car escaping miraculously with only minor head injuries.


We can see from the overturned remains no cat converters and an auto transmission oil pan. The driver side
rear tire has peeled right off the rim.
     Rick was incredibly fortunate in a couple of ways. His body went into shock almost instantly yet he stayed awake That means he didn't bleed heavily which normally would be critical with a major limb severed. He was wandering in the field at night, trying to make his way back to the car. A mid wife and off duty police man were nearby and able to get medical attention underway and call for help. Rick and Miriam wound up in the hospital. Surgeons attempted to save his left arm but infection and internal bleeding made it impossible.  Rick recovered and eventually learned to play drums with one hand and retraining himself to use his feet to do the parts formerly done by his hand. Def Leppard finished recording the new album and it was released to massive sales success. Hysteria released in 1987 sold even better than Pyromania. The band's appearance at Donnington Rock Festival in 1986 was an early indicator the fans were as ready to support Rick Allen as his band members were.
    As for the Corvette, well it had a less fortunate end. Being a desirable imported sports car that was only on the market a few months at that point. It was promptly totalled and the usable remains sold for re use. We know from the one photographs available from a Sheffield newspaper that the car is a 1984 as the front catalytic converters are absent as the 1985 models had them. We can see from the flat transmission oil pan it was a four speed automatic. Even the manual transmission version was semi automatic with a computer selecting which ratios to use for overdrive mode. GM produced 51,547 Corvettes for the home market that year. A complete total rests at 53,877 which suggests a world export total of 2,330. The color black was produced for 7,906 cars in 1984.


The 1985 Corvette switched to dual cats and TPI fuel injection. This is a 1984 chassis.
   Since GM exported Corvettes to Japan, Europe, the Middle East and Latin American countries that year, it's possible Rick's car was an English import. It seems more likely Rick bought it in America since he had an early one. Since he was on the road in USA during the release of the car and it was probably easier to buy one and bring it back to England than to wait for one to arrive. I wish I knew for sure whether it was an import or not but I haven't been able to  find any data on this car other than its spectacular crash photograph. In an interview with Lyn Redgrave done in 1992 for television, Rick recounts a little bit of the accident and it tallies with what appeared in print to date. Unfortunately no details on how or where he bought the car came up. Sadly, this sums up the saga of Rick Allen's 1984 Corvette. Until new information shows up we can assume it ended up in a breaker's yard (wrecking yard) following insurance settlement.
* Article copyright 2012 by Patrick Smith Images by PHS Media Archives.
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