Tested: 1987 Chevrolet Celebrity Eurosport Is Euro Minus The Sport

From the October 1987 issue of Car and Driver.

He held his hands outstretched in a can­-you-believe-this pose, and then broke down laughing. “It’s so red,” he said, cir­cling the Eurosport VR and giggling some more. “So . . . so red.” Matt Smith, our 22- year-old road warrior, has washed and gassed more exotic machinery than most enthusiasts will lay hands on in their life­times, but nothing had ever reduced him to babbling before. He pulled open the VR’s front door. “Gawd, “he howled, “the carpeting. It’s so, um . . . red!”

We’re pleased to report that Matt is re­covering nicely, but there is no arguing with his observations. If the Eurosport VR accomplishes nothing else, it has already advanced the state of the art of red paint jobs by five years. Porsche, Alfa, and the blood-reddest of them all—Ferrari—have nothing on this Chevy. We happened to have red versions of the 911, the Milano, and the Mondial in our lot at the same time as the VR, and we can tell you that they don’t measure up. There is some­thing about splashing standard Camaro red paint—that’s all it is—across such a big canvas that just boggles the senses. We don’t understand it, either.

What we are sure of is that this new Chevrolet delivers a bunch more Euro style and a ton more celebrity. The Euro influence is as unmistakable as an AMG Mercedes. AMG pioneered the flared­-and-spoilered monochrome formula in the early eighties, and the look still turns heads. For the most part, the Celebrity gets the look right, though the mock–Star-Fleet exhaust ports in the rear bumper are a bit much, and the bold “Chevrolet” let­tering across the hood would gross out most European supersedan customers.

But this is America. Drive a pulsating­-red VR through Anytown, U.S.A., and you’ll understand how it feels to be a ce­lebrity. You couldn’t draw more attention to yourself if you strolled down the main drag with Madonna.

The publicity-shy buyer can limit the amount of rubbernecking by opting out of the high-visibility zoot suit for a white, black, or silver paint job, but he’ll still get a car with a show-business past. The VR, you see, was born on an auto-show turntable. Add a pair of black covers to the headlights of a white VR and you ‘re looking at the spitting image of the Celebrity RS concept car, which made the rounds of the auto-show circuit for several years. Envisioned as Chevrolet’s answer to AMG-style cruise missiles, the RS featured a massaged 3.3-liter all-alloy V-6, hunky 16-inch-diameter wheels and tires, a special suspension, and revised instruments.

The idea of producing the RS finally took root about eighteen months ago, when the division’s sales department sud­denly decided that the RS’s wrapper would sell. The final piece of the puzzle clicked into place when AutoStyle Cars, an aggressive specialty-car maker, offered to build a limited run of RS-inspired Celebri­tys. The first production VRs trickled out of the factory late last spring. About 1500 copies—some of them wagons—will be on the road by the end of this year.

This is no simple makeover. In the transformation to VR trim, a garden-vari­ety Eurosport receives a blanked-off grille, a new one-piece urethane front bumper with an integral air dam and a bottom-breather air intake, rocker-panel skirts, lower-door trim pieces, a new ure­thane rear bumper, and a rear spoiler. The new exterior pieces and the stock Eurosport alloy wheels are all painted body color.

If you think the exterior treatment stretches the bounds of good taste, wait until you see the cabin. Inside, the VR has been reworked to match the Celebrity RS show car as closely as possible. The upholstery and the carpeting are all-new. The seats and the door panels are covered in thick gray velour and trimmed with red piping. Black leather thigh bolsters adorn the seats’ lower cushions, and large swatches of black vinyl are sewn onto the upper halves of the door panels and onto the rear of the front seatbacks. Just to make sure you don’t fall asleep at the wheel, the floors of all Eurosport VRs, no matter what the exterior color, are cov­ered in carpeting so red it would embar­rass a Commie.

The new decor may be wild, but it at least delivers one badly needed functional improvement: better seats. Starting with the stock Eurosport front buckets, Auto­Style cuts and reshapes the seat cushions for better support and improved lateral restraint. The flat rear bench seat is recon­toured, too, to accommodate two passen­gers more comfortably than before. (Three can still fit if necessary.) The seat­ing revisions are so effective and so sim­ple, we wonder why Chevrolet didn’t make them long ago.

Unfortunately, this mother lode of inte­rior and exterior cosmetic revisions is all she wrote. In translating the Celebrity RS into a production machine—”produc­tionizing,” the marketing types call it—all of the difficult and expensive improve­ments promised by the show car were edited out. No all-alloy V-6. No meaty tires. No miracle suspension. Our test car didn’t even have a tach. (A pitiful LED rev counter is optional.)

The hard truth is that the Celebrity VR looks like an AMG, but it still drives like a Chevrolet. Mechanically, the VR is no dif­ferent from any off-the-rack Eurosport. Don’t get us wrong. The Eurosport is a nice piece, and our test car drove sweetly. Its optional 125-hp, fuel-injected, 2.8-liter V-6 was always on its toes, as its 9.0-second 0-to-60 time and 118-mph top speed indicate. The Getrag-designed five­-speed manual gearbox shifted effortlessly. The ride was reasonably supple, and the steering was acceptably accurate. Our VR’s overall behavior was plenty ade­quate for a family sedan.

If this were a road test of a standard Eurosport, we’d conclude by encouraging Chevrolet to add a usable tach and im­prove the speedometer’s graphics—and we’d be done with it. But this isn’t just any Celebrity Eurosport. This is the Star Wars Eurosport, the expensive Eurosport: the VR option alone costs a cool $3550. You can’t help suffering elevated expectations when a car looks like this one—and that sets the Eurosport VR up for a fall. Flash alone might satisfy some people, but we want at least an equal helping of substance.

Counterpoints

I wore rose-colored sunglasses when I drove the hot Celebrity, so I had no trouble seeing through its redness dur­ing my search for innermost goodness. What I saw was a very sensibly sized Chevrolet; a car with a very modern and appropriate powertrain; an automobile that—in black, white, or silver—would be admired in most neighborhoods.

I also saw a golden opportunity that was less than fully exploited. Farming the VR project out to an independent contractor gave Chevy another model to put on the road, but one that is less than it should be in two respects: it isn’t complete, and the final package is not an irresistible value. If Chevrolet kept all the members of the Celebrity family in-house, it could easily make a VR with proper instruments, the latest chassis tweaks, a touch more horsepower, and a more attractive price tag. The era of niche marketing appears to be here to stay, but the sooner the big guys get comfortable with serving the multifacet­ed needs of their customers on their regular assembly lines, the better off we’ll be. —Don Sherman

“VR” must stand for “Very Red.” Not only is the VR’s exterior blinding, but a sea of equally red carpet floods into view when you open the door. The problem with this Las Vegas styling is that it attracts too much attention from the wrong kind of people: the police. And even the guy in the red Corvette will look you over at a stoplight. But when the light turns green, he’ll leave you in his dust without trying.

When worked hard, the Eurosport VR performs reasonably well in a straight line. Its acceleration times are similar to those of an Integra LS, and not far short of a Beretta GT’s. It has enough torque at highway cruising speeds that shifting out of fifth isn’t nec­essary for simple passing. Its handling is predictable even when cornering hard. But the VR just doesn’t have enough lateral grip, and its brakes need better modulation and balance. And for a car with such sporting pretensions, the omission of a tachometer is nothing short of absurd. Perhaps that contradic­tion best sums up the VR: overdone styling with underdone stuffing. —Nicholas Bissoon-Dath

Let’s say you’ve just picked up your brand-new Lamborghini Countach. It’s what you’ve always wanted, but your neighbor just down Rolling Dough Lane has one exactly like it. Hey, you’ve already spent more than $100,000, so what’s another five thou for a distinctive rear wing? Sure, throw it on.

At the upper end of the price spec­trum, paying such sums for added dis­tinction is easy. What’s the difference between $120,000 and $125,000? But when you’re talking about a mid-priced sedan, paying $3550 for added flair seems extravagant. Relatively speaking, that’s like spending $30,000 for a paint job on a Countach.

But if you want a racy-looking Celeb­rity Eurosport, it’s going to cost you. No, the VR package won’t bring you any increase in performance. And you won’t notice any improvement in handling. Aside from better seats, about all you’ll get for your $3550 is a lot of attention.

One thing is clear: “VR” doesn’t stand for “Very Rational.” —Arthur St. Antoine

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com