Peek Inside Football Star Ronde Barber’s Garage Full of Corvettes

Quick Stats: Ronde Barber, Analyst for Fox NFL, Super Bowl champion
Daily Driver: 2017 Ram 2500 (Ronde’s rating: 8 plus on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite road trip: Tampa to Pennsylvania
Car he learned to drive in: Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme
First car bought: 1997 Toyota 4Runner

Fox analyst and Super Bowl champion and defensive back Ronde Barber likes Corvettes so much, he doesn’t have just one. He has four, ranging from a 1966 to a 2014. Barber has a large enough garage to fit all his vehicles, which include a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van and his daily driver, a 2017 Ram 2500.

“It’s a monster. It’s only an 8 because it sucks a lot of gas,” he says with a laugh when I asked him to rate his Ram pickup. “But it’s fun. Big. I’m above everybody. It carries everything that I need. I put golf clubs in the side cubby, all my daughter’s lacrosse stuff. It’s very functional for what I do. It’s perfect for what I need.”

Barber grew up in southwest Virginia, where almost everyone he knew had a pickup. This is his third pickup truck from Ram. “I had the 1500 before that one, and then I upgraded to the big boy a couple years ago because I wanted something different, but function helps. It’s choice, like having something bigger than everybody else.”

The truck is also styled the way he likes. “It’s got the extra cab room in the back, so the back seat is as roomy as any car I’ve ever had. and that back seat lays completely down. You can put a bed in there, really,” he says. “That’s convenient when hauling dogs or if I’m going to take it across the state for any reason. If I’m driving anyplace, it’s very utilitarian.”

2003 Corvette

Rating: 9

Barber’s love of Corvettes started in 2003, when he bought his mom one for her 50th birthday. “I bought her the 2003 50th anniversary Corvette. Hers is white. I bought one for myself, which was yellow. That was my first 2003 Corvette,” he says.

“For me at the time, it was 10. I’d never had a sports car before. I’d had a bunch of utility vehicles, so it was fun,” Barber says of the convertible, which he says he’d now rate a 9. “It was low to the ground, it was fast, I customized it a little bit to my liking. Corvettes are simple inside. There’s not a lot going on electronically.”

1966 Corvette

Rating: 10

“In 2010 my wife bought me a cherry red 1966 that my neighbor had restored to its original state. It’s pretty cool. The only knock on it is that the A/C doesn’t work and it’s hot in Florida,” Barber says, laughing. “Other than that, it’s a pretty cool car. It takes some love and attention to get that thing going, but it’s really worth it.”

This Corvette gets a perfect 10 from Barber, who says it’s a beautiful car. He drives it very sparingly; it sits up on its rack in the garage and only gets out a couple times a year. “Great look, color’s perfect, seats are all restored to original, got the same manufactured tires, but I put on aftermarket tires because I wanted to save the originals we had. When I think of Corvettes, I think of that model: the C2. It’s such a really good-looking car.”

1978 Corvette

Rating: 9

After he got the 1966 Corvette, Barber bought this, his third Corvette, from a neighbor of his brother–in-law, who was the only owner. This silver car is the 25th anniversary model and had less than 5,000 miles on it.

“When I grew up, if you saw a Corvette, you saw this one, the one with the big wide body in the back, the dolphin hood where it goes up and slopes down in the front with the big, wide wheelbase in the front as well and the narrow waist,” he says. “It’s a good-looking car.”

Barber says this Corvette reminds him of his youth. “It’s the most fun one to drive because it’s not as difficult to work a manual as the ’66,” he says. “They’re all manuals except for the 2003.”

He says this is the Corvette he takes when he’s feeling like he wants a rugged car. “You’re really working the vehicle, so it’s the one that I keep down. The 2003 is up, the ’66 is up, the ’78 is down where I can get at it,” he says.

Barber rates this car a 9 because it’s a little temperamental. “It’s got those classic flip-up lights, the ones that get stuck. Half the time, one of them will be up,” he says, laughing. “Just on stylistics, it’s a beautiful car.”

2014 Corvette Stingray

Rating: 10

Barber also keeps this Corvette down on the garage floor where he can easily access it. When he retired from the NFL, the Stingray was a retirement gift from two coaches and a couple of buddies.

“I was going to buy it myself. My neighbor across the street used to work for a dealership, so I ordered it from him, and my wife told [my coaches]. Those guys said, ‘We’re not going to let him pay for it,’” he says, with a laugh. “So they ended up paying for it. It was a good gift. This one’s a treat.”

Barber loves this Stingray. “When it came out, it was hot again,” he says. “This is an ass-kicker. It’s a seven-speed manual, white with red interior. It has that new Corvette look to it that I think everybody now can relate to this vehicle looking like. I didn’t have to put any aftermarket stuff on it. And it’s easily my favorite one to drive, just because of how well it handles.”

He bought it to mark the end of his career. “Since I already had three Corvettes, it seemed like the perfect gift for myself. And for no other reason than I was at the age, I had some disposable income and why not spend it on cars that I see as assets? I had just built a garage for the other cars, so this would give me a spot to put all four of my Corvettes. It was perfect,” he says.

Barber likes that Corvettes are affordable sports cars. “They’re available to the everyman, and that’s how I identify those cars. They’re not Ferraris, Lotuses, or whatever was most popular back when I was younger. They’re one of the American muscle cars,” he says. “I relate to that because it reminds me of my youth. It reminds me of cars that people in my hometown would have driven, not the big, expensive ones that you find in big cities. I grew up in a small town, and this speaks to me more than some of the more expensive cars that are out there.”

Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

Rating: 8

“The best thing about it is that it’s big but drivable. To me, it doesn’t feel any different to my pickup truck. It’s probably the same length, maybe a foot different,” Barber says. “It’s functional. We drive it over to the East Coast to Florida all the time, take it over to the Breakers in Palm Beach, and park it in the parking lot.”

For many years, Barber traveled to South Carolina for a family trip with several other families, and the Sprinter was perfect for that seven-hour drive. “We have a pod that we have on the back. We could put our luggage in [that and] have all that space in the middle to carry five to seven people,” he says.

But for Barber, the Sprinter’s best functionality is for transportation to his daughter’s lacrosse tournaments. “On the weekend, she’d have five or six games and I had a refuge. I had DirecTV; the back seat lays out into a bed. It’s got four captain’s chairs, including the driver’s seat. It’s a nice, easy vehicle. It’s got a fridge, it’s got its own generator, microwave. It used to have a stove, but we took that out—we just didn’t need that,” he says with a laugh.

Barber has never had an issue with the Sprinter. “Every now and then, something’ll go wrong with the breaker, because it’s a house, it’s for the same type of functionality as a domicile, so you’ll have issues with the breakers,” he says. “You could easily live in there.”

Car he learned to drive in

Barber learned to drive in Washington, D.C., as well as Roanoke, Virginia, where he grew up.

“My first time driving a car was with my uncle Rick. That was on a mid ’80s Hyundai Excel, and it was a stick shift. I learned to drive on stick shift. I can’t tell you how many times I stalled that thing out trying to learn. The funny part about that is when I turned 16, when I got my license, he gifted that car to me for my junior year and that was our car in high school. And before I went to college, the car had died,” Barber says, laughing.

He and his twin brother, Tiki, learned to drive at Tysons Corner Center, where his uncle took them. “We were like, ‘Hey, teach us how to drive it.’ He takes us to the mall parking lot when no one’s there to see if you can get the clutch and the gas to marry up and get the thing to go forward,” he says. “Those are my best memories learning how to drive, and obviously I learned with my mom back in Roanoke.”

When Barber and his brother got their learner’s permits, their mom let them drive to church on Sunday. “One of us got to drive to, the other one got to drive from church,” Barber says, laughing. “Those are invaluable experiences, learning how to get to and from places. My mom worked, single parent, so she had to take us everywhere.”

The Barber twins would also go to their grandmother’s house on the eastern shore of Virginia, where they were first inspired to drive. “She had this old, beat-up pickup truck in the backyard. You can imagine her on a couple acres, private driveway. It was an old blue pickup sitting in the backyard, and we’d always end up playing in that thing, trying to get it to start,” he says, laughing. “But we never drove it—we didn’t know how. Those are funny memories.”

It wasn’t all that easy to learn on the manual Hyundai, either. “It was definitely a time on task thing, repetition. It definitely took me a long time to figure out how to drive stick, and I probably wasn’t good at it until I had a buddy in high school who had a stick shift and he’d let me drive his car. He’d let me practice in his car. ‘Hey, we’re going out, you want to drive?’ I figured out how to work the clutch, and he’d give me pointers,” he says.

Barber had looked forward to driving as soon as he could. “When you get to high school where I grew up, you never want to take the school bus. Only the uncool kids took the school bus,” he says, laughing.

He couldn’t drive until his junior year, but during his sophomore year a friend in his apartment complex whose brother was a senior took the twins to school. “That next year before we had a car, we were like, ‘How are we going to get to school?’ he says with a laugh. “We’re not getting on a bus after not taking the bus our entire sophomore year.”

The brothers felt their only solution was to get up extra early and drive their mom to work in her Cutlass Supreme, which was 20 minutes in the opposite direction from their school.

“Just so we can have the car. And then, go back and pick her up from work after practice,” Barber says, laughing. “It’s so bad. It’s part of my vanity. At the time, the worst thing in the world would have been taking the bus to school, so we went out of our way to make sure we had a car for the day. She worked at the Girl Scouts of America for 30 years, so we’d drive her. Thank God she never had emergencies while we had the car.”

In college, Barber’s mom got him and his brother a Hyundai Sonata that the two had for their second and third years in college. “On the way home—it was in the spring—there was a rainstorm, and we wrecked it. Tiki was driving, the car started to hydroplane on the wet road. It ran up onto a bank and we completely destroyed the axle,” he says.

The insurance company totaled the Sonata, and with that money, the brothers bought a Camaro for their last year at the University of Virginia.

First car bought

The first car Barber bought for himself was a 1997 Toyota 4Runner. It was right before he got drafted to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

He had they Toyota for three years, then upgraded to a Lexus. “It was more of a necessity, because we needed to get rid of the Camaro, because we were going our separate ways,” he says of himself and his brother. “We’d shared a car our entire life, for four years. I [needed] something that could carry my stuff from Charlottesville, Virginia, down to Florida, and the 4Runner fit the bill.”

The 4Runner also made sense financially. “I didn’t know how much money I was going to have. I didn’t know how long my career was going to last. It was a sensible decision at the time. It fit into my price range,” he says.

The 4Runner helped him make the trip to his new home in Tampa. “I made that trip three times. I drove down, I drove back up, and I drove back down for good. I had to drive down for a mini camp after I was drafted, so I was down here for a couple of weeks during the summer, and I drove home back to Charlottesville, signed out of my lease, and packed everything that I had the second time and took off, moved down here for good. It’s a long drive,” he says with a laugh.

The Toyota was a reliable car, and it ran its course, he says, before he decided to get a Lexus. “I never had a problem with it,” he says. “I only had it for three years. I took it down to Miami a couple times.”

Favorite road trip

Barber has taken his fair share of road trips. “Growing up, we had a ton of them, but they were always usually the same, because we’d drive from Roanoke, Virginia, all the way to the eastern shore of Virginia,” Barber says. “We did that every holiday, every time we had a summer break or winter break. That’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive. It’s an indelible memory. It almost became routine.”

Last summer, even though he has a Sprinter, Barber rented an RV and drove from Tampa to North Carolina and Maryland, looking at colleges with his daughter. “That was a pretty fun trip,” he says. “We were rebuilding the floors, so we had two dogs that needed to get out of the house, so we planned that trip around the floors being redone, and the RV was the only way that we were comfortable enough transporting the dogs through that trip. It was a good trip.”

They stayed in hotels as well as some RV resorts. “On the way home, we stopped at this RV park in Myrtle Beach that was right on the water. It was fantastic. We probably should have stayed a couple of days; we only stayed one day. It was seamless. I had rented an RV before and had some problems with it, but this one was pretty smooth. RV ownership is not an easy thing,” he says, laughing.

NFL on Fox Sports

The Super Bowl champ and five-time Pro Bowler joined Fox seven years ago, when he retired from the NFL. During the off season, Barber is also on the board of a local golf tournament that’s a PGA event.

Barber appreciates the chance to serve on the golf tournament’s board because, as he says, “My off season, the good and bad thing about just doing football, is you’re 17 weeks on and then you’re 30 weeks off.”

As for his job at Fox, Barber says, “It’s a great company to work for. It gave me an opportunity to do what I’m doing, which is call games, be an analyst at games right after I finished playing. So I jumped right in after I retired, and I’ve really enjoyed it.”