Rowley GTC Daytona Spyder

Steve Whalen wasn't a customer. He was one of us. For most of his working life he was at Corvette Connection — bodywork, paint, mechanical, fabrication, whatever was on the schedule. He could lay down a coat of paint, weld a bracket, time an engine, or talk an owner through the right way to do something. Decades of Corvettes passed through his hands. This car was the one he built for himself.

It started in 1993. Steve had been thinking about a Ferrari Daytona Spyder for years, and he did his homework before he picked up a wrench. His 1991 hand-written notes evaluating different kit-car manufacturers are still in the file. He chose Rowley Corvette Supply of Rowley, Massachusetts — at the time one of the most respected Daytona-replica builders in the country, featured in Kit Car magazine in 1988. The original Rowley GTC assembly manual, dated February 1990, is still with the car. Both stay with the next owner.

The donor was a real 1969 Corvette Convertible, VIN-documented to its February 1969 St. Louis assembly. F-41 heavy-duty suspension, power windows, tinted glass, auxiliary hardtop, green over saddle from the factory. Don Aspinall of the Corvette Connection family bought the car in 1984. Steve bought it from Don in 1993 and the build began.

He worked on it the way he worked on everything — meticulously, by hand, on his own bench. The L-36 big-block 427 was rebuilt to a specification he wrote himself, the four-page itemized work ticket from L+L Auto Machine in Groton still in the file alongside his hand-written notes to the engine builder: "Speed-Pro parts. GOOD parts. Want car to go like hell ALL day long. Sound mean. Low end ++." That was Steve in a sentence. Stainless Works built a complete stainless exhaust to his order. Rock Valley Antique Auto Parts fabricated a custom stainless fuel tank from a wooden mockup he carved and fitted himself, captured in the build photos on file. Three Ferrari research books he bought in 1996 are still in the file. Steve documented everything. Over a hundred vendor invoices survive.

The Richmond six-speed is in the car. Zenith chrome wire wheels with knock-off centers sit at all four corners. The body is on the chassis. The soft top is fitted. The hood with its twin Daytona scoops is in place. What's left is the finishing work: final paint, the interior, headlight buckets and tail-light housings, grille fabrication, the wiring terminations, and the punch list our team has documented in person.

Steve passed in 2018. The car came to his best friend Wayne Gordon, who has kept it at his home in Connecticut ever since. Wayne is offering it now to someone who will honor what Steve built. This isn't a turn-key driver. It's a thirty-year build by a man who lived this trade, offered honestly, with every piece of paper that documents it.

The Ferrari 365 GTS/4 "Daytona" Spyder is one of the most coveted shapes Maranello ever built, and one of the rarest — only about 120 genuine factory Spyders were made, and an authentic example trades well into seven figures today. In the 1980s, a handful of American coachbuilders set out to recreate that silhouette on a Chevrolet Corvette chassis, pairing Ferrari lines with V8 reliability and parts you could find at any NAPA.

The best-known of those builders, McBurnie Coachcraft, supplied the black Daytonas driven on Miami Vice — but Ferrari's trademark lawsuits brought the era to a close by the early 1990s, and clean survivors are now genuinely scarce. Among the builders, Rowley Corvette Supply of Rowley, Massachusetts earned a reputation for doing it right: correct proportions, Connolly leather, German cloth, and a carbon-fiber rear spring to civilize the Corvette ride. The Rowley GTC was featured in Kit Car magazine in 1988, and built in limited numbers.

This is one of those cars, built to its original Rowley GTC manual — and an unusually ambitious one. Where most Daytona replicas left the shop on a small-block with an automatic, Steve specified a fully rebuilt L-36 big-block 427 behind a Richmond six-speed, on a documented 1969 Corvette Convertible. That manual and the 1988 magazine feature both stay with the car. You're not just buying a tribute to a Ferrari — you're buying one of the better examples of a breed that can't be made anymore.