Minneapolis Street Sighting: Chevrolet Corvair convertible

In my few years of blogging, this is my first street-shot post-facelift Corvair; and man, is this one a stunner! To be fair, the Corvair a rather recent interest for me; not that I didn't pay attention to them before, it's just that.. well... I can't lie. I never really did pay attention to them before, and honestly this is the very car that sparked my interest in these cars. I've long had a soft spot for unloved, and uncliched compact domestic cars, and to that event, the rear-flat-six-engine, rear wheel drive Corvair fits to a tee.
Launched in 1960, the Chevrolet Corvair orginially spawned a four door sedan, a coupe and convertible, and a wagon. Later in its life, the Rampside pickup, and passenger and commercial vans were introduced to do battle with the Dodge A100 and Ford Econoline. Shortly after the Corvair's introduction, the car quickly become a hot-topic in the safety debate. Republican/Independent Ralph Nader decided that the Corvair was unsafe, and the propensity to roll over was quite high; this topic would later be recalled with the likes of the Suzuki Samurai and later, the famous Ford Explorer/Firestone "debate". All three of these automotive "dangers" have widely been debunked by automtive experts, including many car magazines, though many "researchers" conclude that all three of these automotive "dangers" still exist.
The first generation car is, to me, not that great in design. It looks frumpy, almost like the GM design team was simply rushing out sketches so they could play in the ever-growing compact car field. Up front, the headlights were inset just enough to render the surrounds a major rust area, and as a whole, the front end looked out of place with the rest of the body's characteristic; it's almost like Chevrolet was trying to out-Citroen Citroen. It didn't quite work, and in 1965, the car was redesigned and smoothed out, definitely for the better.
While I don't care for the 1960 to 1964 cars, as one can tell simply from reading this far, I quite like the post-1965s. For 1965, everything I didn't like about the car was corrected. Not only was the front end smoothed out, the whole car seemed to mesh like it didn't before. The profile was sporty, and evoked [to me] thoughts of much pricier sports cars, not an "economy car". Chevrolet though so too, and in 1965, it introduced the Yenko Stinger, a Corvair specifically bred for SCCA racing. With this new addition, GM brass tried to the get their compact to compact with likes of the Triumph TR4, MGBs, Fiat 124 spiders, and to an extent, contemporary Porsches. Not a bad target, I say. To this day, Stingers are quite rare, and do fetch quite a pretty penny. While the non-Stinger isn't necessarily as rare, I wouldn't consider it a worse car. What's not to like about a rear-engine car with reasonable-if not decent handling? I quite like the idea of a flat-six powered rear wheel drive car. After all, Porsche seems to be doing well with it, so it can't be all that bad.