As part of the warm-up before the great unveiling, a blistering, cranked-up, raunchy rock’n’roll guitar solo played live by a blistering, cranked-up, raunchy rock’n’roll guitarist. Yaoooowwwweeee! How many notes per second? How fast do you like your clicheeeeees, sir? Comeback for the can-do country/ resurrection of Motor City, USA/ revival of the Great American sports car – the flaky phrases are coming thick and fast, and sticky as warm snow. A blizzard of Chevrolet execs in downtown Detroit for the International Auto Show, all of them hoping that the seventh generation Corvette – launched today complete with its own biopic, shot in black and white for the full Chevy heritage effect – will rev up to be a real icon. All of them wearing the distinctive Stingray badge based on the undulating body that wraps around the driver’s – and not in a James Dean, Spydery kind of way. The Stingray is engineered to be 99lbs lighter, yet more rigid and robust: the car has presence and the driver gets to feel it, allegedly. Could be the world’s most highly engineered vehicle, or a contraption for high end branding. A car or the image of one? Even after the veil was lifted to reveal the Stingray, Motor City’s order of priorities – ‘cos you can have it in any order you like so long as it’s this order – remains unclear.