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"Enthusiasts are abuzz about the new Corvette Stingray, and with good reason: from the 455-horsepower small-block to the painfully evocative fender logo, the new &amp;quot;C7&amp;quot; appears to be a hugely desirable car. With a base price of $51,995, it&amp;#039;s a tremendous bargain and it probably represents the most performance available for the money. Unless, of course, you&amp;#039;d rather pay much less-how does $17,000 sound?- to go nearly as quickly.  A few times a year, I coach drivers at Summit Point Raceway&amp;#039;s Shenandoah road course. My students have arrived in everything from a Yaris hatchback to a 911 GT2, but the most common car I see is a late-model Corvette of some type. As a track rat, the Corvette takes some beating; it&amp;#039;s fast enough to stay ahead of most traffic without being impossibly expensive to maintain and operate.  My intermediate-group student from a few weeks ago was someone I&amp;#039;d coached before, but he&amp;#039;d sold his Mitsubishi Evolution in favor of a 1999 Corvette fixed-roof-coupe. The &amp;quot;FRC&amp;quot; is often mistaken for the Z06 that used the same body style, but it has the engine and suspension from the Z51 fastback. Inside and out, his &amp;#039;Vette was a little worn, but all the mechanicals were sound and the price was certainly right.  After a day in the worn-out passenger seat of the Light Pewter Metallic coupe, my student was still experiencing some difficulty reaching the Corvette&amp;#039;s relatively high limits. His Evolution had been considerably easier to drive thanks to the combination of all-wheel-drive and a 60:40 weight distribution, but he was starting to really enjoy his new car&amp;#039;s ability to adjust its angle of attack in midcorner. I, on the other hand, had been thinking that it had been a few years since I&amp;#039;d driven a C5 in anger. We decided that I would take his car out for a session and see what we could discover about the &amp;#039;Vette&amp;#039;s ability to get around Shenandoah.  As if to confirm every stereotype about old Corvettes, my student&amp;#039;s car greeted me by requiring a bit of a shove to get the sagging driver&amp;#039;s door closed. Although the interior was presumably shipped in a single color, time and sun had faded it to a sort of tri-tone scheme. The leather on both the steering wheel and shift lever was cracked and split open, but first gear slotted easily and the big V8 rumbled us out onto pit lane with distinct menace.   Compared to the new Stingray or to either generation of the Z06 Corvette, the FRC isn&amp;#039;t particularly quick. Still, with 350 horsepower to push under 3200 pounds, the fourteen-year-old coupe can show a dirty quartet of exhaust pipes to most performance-oriented cars. More importantly, it&amp;#039;s charming as it does so. The steering is never terribly communicative but the wide nose can be pointed visually and it&amp;#039;s easy to catch the tail when it steps out.  And the tail will step out, because the LS1 engine has enough torque to spin the back tires at pretty much any time. The shifter can&amp;#039;t be hurried but it&amp;#039;s easy to handle the relatively long throws. Where the later Corvettes occasionally feel frantic, the FRC is consistently balanced in its responses. There isn&amp;#039;t too much power for the brakes and on regular street tires the grip gives up in a predictable fashion. It would be going too far to compare it to a Miata, but compared to something like a high-power Mustang the &amp;#039;Vette is a sweetheart.  After just five laps I found myself pushing this old car pretty hard, hassling the Porsches into the corners and exiting with early throttle to make it a bit dramatic. My student was laughing out loud as we swept past the 125mph mark on the Playskool speedometer down the back straight before pressing the sliding calipers into ABS activation for the hairpin. Every bump on the track felt like it was rattling the fiberglass body directly against the backbone frame, but the steering wheel didn&amp;#039;t shake too much. That was a good thing, because the way the seat was rocking back in forth in its loose tracks sometimes made it necessary to hang onto said wheel for support.  A lurid third-gear slide through Shenandoah&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Big Bend&amp;quot; informed me that I&amp;#039;d overheated the back tires playing World Of Outlaws in someone else&amp;#039;s car, and that meant it was time to bring the session to an end before I made a more serious mistake. It was with some reluctance that I brought the Corvette back to the pits. In the space of twenty minutes, it had effectively reminded me why these cars have such an outstanding reputation among recreational trackday drivers and SCCA racers.  John, the car&amp;#039;s owner, has under twenty grand in it despite replacing the brakes, wheels, and tires. He&amp;#039;s unlikely to fix the sagging door or the worn-out seats, but he does plan to bump up the LS1&amp;#039;s performance, something that the comprehensive Chevy aftermarket makes very easy. In his place, I might have spent the extra five thousand dollars to buy a 2002 Z06, with its considerable slate of upgrades, but I can&amp;#039;t imagine too many better ways to have fun on a racetrack in a street-legal car for what he&amp;#039;s spent. You could buy three &amp;#039;99 fixed-roof coupes for the price of a new Stingray, which means you could crash two of them learning your trackday craft. Yeah, that&amp;#039;s a crazy idea, but a good C5 is a very sane choice indeed. 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