Maybe it's just that after a while, every couple becomes Ted and Sally Forth. (Those of you who don't get this comic strip, which is a definitive documentary of just how much trouble one man can get into and stay married, should holler to the local pressmen.)

Of course, every relationship can be strained when an alluring third party steps in. Curvaceous, responsive, powerful -- what man wouldn't lose his head? And what good spouse wouldn't turn up her cute nose in response?

A Corvette has a way of evoking strong reactions. Even though this 12-year-old shape is familiar by now, a bright aqua Corvette convertible still gathers crowds in sunlit parking lots. Exterior styling, of course, rates a Full Linda Blair. "It does look sleek. It does look 'race car,'" noted the Splendid Co-Driver. I prefer the original flat tail to the ZR1 style rounded version that all Corvettes now have, but we don't get to make those decisions. Getting to design Corvettes for a living would be much too idyllic for this existence. Besides, I'm sure certain of my acquaintance prefer the tail I had twelve years ago, too.

THE SC-D: The back end looks like a Corvette's back end. What more can one say to an exhaust and a square tight little back end. Actually, it's kind of cute for that matter.

JJ: This is the comment of one who likes tight little back ends.

The Corvette welcomes you, eagerly unlocking its doors as you approach. (A chip in the key fob activates a proximity switch, but it's a nice illusion.) As you slide down and in, the power seat absorbs you as an integral part of the car. As the SC-D said, "The seat doesn't just hug you and say 'hello.' It gets fresh." The Corvette is refreshingly egalitarian in that all the power adjustments available to the driver's seat are also available on the passenger side.

Some of the Corvette's interior pieces, like the center console forward of the glove compartment, are rubberized. This fascinated the SC-D, who thought it might not collect scratches as easily and might stay cleaner looking. I suspect it has something to do with preventing damage from unexpected rain with the top down, but of course only a guy would do that, right?

THE SC-D: "Some of the carpeting materials are of relatively short dense pile that's soft and very nice. Other parts of it, on the inside of the passenger's footwell on the right-hand side is covered with the cheaper stuff that is going to pill and look awful really quickly. Wait a minute, why would the guy who drives this car care whether or not the inside carpeting in the passenger footwell is pilling? Have I lost my mind?"

What they'll care about, dear, is selective ride control with three settings: touring, sport and performance. The same arched, somewhat baroque-looking instrument panel we've noted in previous Corvettes. White on black gauges with orange needles for oil pressure, oil temperature, water temperature and volts, clustered around a digital speedometer with a digital fuel gauge and range to empty with a digital odometer, and waterfall tach skating down the right side. The various system gauges can be displayed digitally in the center of the dash using a button in the center stack. You can also display instantaneous miles per gallon, average miles per gallon, and range remaining with that same display. At night, the instrument lighting is beige or orange on a black background. Needles are the same color as the dials, but stay nonetheless reasonably visible.

On top of all the other electronic wizardry, our tested Corvette had a low tire pressure warning system to tell you when the Goodyear extended mobility tires are about to demonstrate their capability to run flat. The Goodyear GS-Cs are both "handed" and different sizes front and rear, the result being four different tires on the four corners of the car.

Yes, there's an obligatory cupholder, but as the SC-D noted, "The cupholder design seems to indicate that one spends time doing far more exciting things than drinking beverages." There's a center compartment and hidden cubbyholes in the arm rests about the size of two video cassettes. In the back, under the tonneau cover, are two flip up panels with small bins underneath. All in all, one Golden Cupholder. But who cares?

THE SC-D: I'm not prejudiced, but you open this hood and it says, "guy car." The biggest piece of whatever is it that's visible is some huge tubular thing that sucks air off the front. Right away that's tremendously evident. It's just really quite amazing. Colored handles on the dip stick, which is nice, but doesn't go to nearly the same extent as other cars.

JJ: Well, the stylists have clearly been at work here. The cam covers are styled. It is obviously also not an engine you want to work on yourself. In fact, at the moment I can't see any of the spark plugs, much less get to them. But when you flip up the nose of the Corvette, you also see the suspension A-arm and all the gorgeous detail in there. It's a tidy package and more than a little bit race car-like.

THE SC-D: I will have to agree that I do appreciate the design that has gone into covering up all kinds of things and the cam covers and so forth do look very sleek.

JJ: But it is clearly still an engine as opposed to, say, the Infiniti Q45 where everything was just so styled it looked like there was this decorative luggage in the front of the car and had nothing to do with function.

Also, when you flip up the hood, there are interior lights that go on to illuminate the beautiful engine. Vanity, thy name is Corvette.

ON THE ROAD

Jeez, you sit far back in this thing. The nose isn't all that far away, but because you're sitting low and you see so much hood, including the entire width of the hood including the fender ridges and the blisters down the center, you feel like the nose is impossibly out there somewhere. Popping the headlights up actually helps a bit.

It's really got a lot of power. Of course, with the very wide tires, it's hard to crank the steering wheel over much. It's amazing how close you sit to the back of this car. For some reason I did not get this same impression in the Corvette coupes.

I like the thick rim steering wheel. You can get a good handful of it.

And you need a good grip. A Corvette is a high performance car; the movement of your wrist is translated immediately into lateral G. Yet it's not as rewarding as some other cars, simply because it is so capable. When you go through a corner and the car just sticks and you generate a lot of Gs and you go through the corner very quickly, there's not as much reward there as in a less sticky car where you have to apply correct techniques to corner well or to have fun in the car. Here, the capacity of the car is just so great that almost no matter what you do, you're not getting your limits, you're not challenging yourself as a driver because the car can handle anything you throw at it.

Good line through a corner? We don't need no stinking good line through a corner. Put it anywhere. This car sticks.

With this much grip, even tightly twisting roads pose no challenge. The Corvette chews them up and spits them out. No matter what speed you carry into the corner it seems, even if twice the posted amount, the tires just grip. The car just goes around and as long as you don't bring the power on too suddenly on the exit, you'll make it through just swimmingly.

We switched to performance mode, the toughest of the three suspension modes, for our local twisty. And you certainly do feel every little ripple and imperfection in the pavement. It's not nearly as harsh as the infamous 84 Corvette, but you know they're there. Switch right to the touring suspension and the road suddenly becomes noticeably smoother. It's not an order of magnitude improvement cause this is at base a car with incredibly wide tires and a handling suspension, but it is a little easier on the kidneys. All in all, though, the difference isn't as great as one might expect among the suspension settings. In the touring mode you're aware of the nature of the pavement you're traversing. In performance mode, you're intimately familiar with the details of it. The sport mode just kicks in the performance mode above a certain speed.

Now a gripe: the freewheeling. It may well be due to the automatic transmission, but when you get out of the accelerator, the car does not slow down very quickly. Because it is so responsive in all other axes, one expects it to be that way in deceleration also.

And it is, if you use the powerful brakes. We came over a blind brow in a quick right-left and discovered a mail truck pulling out into the middle of the second apex. In a lot of cars, this would be a crisis of the first order. In the Corvette, you just plant your foot a little farther to the left. The brakes haul it down so suddenly that one must be very careful. The guy behind you can't stop that fast, and he probably doesn't expect that you can stop that fast, so you need to be very conscious about following traffic in this car.

THE SC-D: I feel like I'm driving something in a comic book, it has such a long nose. It's very strange. I'm on a curvy road and driving cautiously at slow speed to get a really good sense of the feel of the car. In some ways I have to agree that the sense of satisfaction from driving skillfully is fairly minimal because the car's got sort of power and stick that protect you from doing anything interesting.

This car is too big for me to enjoy driving and I don't know whether that's a boy thing or what, but it feels like it has too much body in front and it's too wide and it doesn't feel nimble enough and I'm not having a fun time with this car. It's very big and it wants to be very showoffy and it wants to be what it wants to be and it's not very interested in my inputs. It's tolerating my existence.

It's such a boy car. I do not psychically understand this car. It's a fine car to be riding around in while some big strong guy who's plugged into this car is having a lovely time showing it off to his splendid beau, but this isn't a car that speaks to me.

JJ: Tell me that part about the big strong guy again.

THE SC-D: The reason why I like being driven around in this car is that it conveys an important message. This here must be one hot babe with a hot guy who drives this hot car which is to display her around in it. This I can handle.

JJ: But one, at least this male one, looks for reasons to drive the car. Going to the grocery store? Honey, taking the Corvette. Going for a haircut? Honey, taking the Corvette. Going down to the home improvement warehouse to pick up some wallboard? Honey, taking the Corvette. We'll arrange for delivery.

Lowering the Corvette's top can certainly be a one person operation, but it cannot be done from inside the car due to the location of some of the latch releases. Two of the latch releases are under the tonneau cover, so you have to be outside to reach them.

The radio in this car has a feature we've long thought car radios should have. The faster you go -- which is to say the louder the noise around you and the buffeting in the cockpit -- the louder the radio gets. When you slow down for a light, the radio quiets so you're not blasting the people next to you with the same volume you needed at speed.

It's very easy to create highway room in the Corvette. If you need to be ahead of the guy next to you, just a gentle squeeze of the right foot will add 10 mph in no time at all and you can move over where you need to be.

How fast can the Corvette go? We went to our favorite unpatrolled straight line nonpublic road and nailed it. And, frankly, we ran out of road long before we ran out of engine and we ran out of engine at over 100 MPH. It's no surprise that this car goes over 100, but boy it got there fast and there was plenty left. And yes, you can light up the tires on the Corvette, although the traction control kicks the throttle pedal back at you when you try.

There's no reason for the power seats in the Corvette to have one of those 2-button position memories, because if you have one of these cars, you're not going to let anybody else drive it. And, based on the SC-D's comments, they might not want to drive it.

THE SC-D: This isn't a car that a guy buys to share with his spouse. It is a car that he buys to catch the spouse. And once he catches the spouse there is no way he is going to let her drive it anyway so there.

JJ: When it's time to think about fueling the Corvette a little notice comes up on the panel that says Reserve. We got right around 20 miles a gallon in mixed driving, and not too bad for the amount of performance you get from this vehicle. Fifty-five miles an hour is 1500 RPM. This car ain't hardly working.

With the top up, the Corvette seems almost a little louder, in part because you notice some shakes and rattles that aren't there with the tonneau cover in place. The convertible top forms such a tight seal that when you close the doors surprisingly sometimes they don't close all the way because of the trapped air pressure. The windshield wipers leave a pronounced widow's peak more than halfway down the windshield.

With the top up, too, the left side blind spot is particularly large. The B pillar isn't so bad on the right side, although you can lose a car back there, but on the left side it's rather poor and not amenable to being eliminated by mirror adjustment.

One thing that would be useful, given where you sit in the Corvette convertible, is the device we saw on the Acura RL that swings up the steering wheel when you open the door to get out. You're sitting so low down and so horizontally that the steering wheel makes it a little tricky to get out of the car, at least with the steering wheel adjusted the way I like to adjust it.

CONCLUSION

The next generation Corvette is just around the corner, and it'll have big shoes to fill. For all its performance, the Corvette remains a car that you can drive on the street, which may be one of the big differences between a $50,000 mass produced "exotic" car, and your quarter-million to million dollar very limited production exotics. You wouldn't want to park your F50 at the Piggly Wiggly. The Vette's a dream car for the real world. You can drive on real streets and park in gravel lots and the car is tractable on something other than a speedway. No, you can't carry much groceries, but is this car is for Ted's fantasy, not Sally's.

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