General Motors sent the first production C7 Corvette Stingray to the Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale auction last weekend to auction it off for charity (and drum up a little additional publicity at the same time), and the assembled one-percenters didn’t disappoint: the first 2014 Chevrolet Corvette sold for $1.1 million.

The first owner of a C7 Corvette is Rick Hendrick, owner of the Hendrick Motorsports NASCAR team, a longtime Chevrolet dealership owner and a presidentially-pardoned felon who built and raced his first drag racer (a ’31 Chevy) at age 14, according to his Wikipedia page. Past transgressions aside (hey, he was defrauding people out of Hondas—he’s a Chevy man), Hendrick seems like just the kind of guy who should take home the first C7 Corvette, so we can’t begrudge him his prize. Especially since the $1.1 million he spent will go to Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, a noble institution, albeit perhaps a little less of one than, say, UNICEF.

Chevrolet also auctioned off four other performance cars at Barrett-Jackson to raise money for charity. GM CEO and chairman Dan Akerson put his personal turquoise ’58 Corvette on the block, where it sold for $270,000 that went to Habitat for Humanity’s Detroit bureau; the $400,000 from a sale of a 2012 COPO Camaro Convertible went to the American Heart Association; the first Chevy Camaro ZL1 Convertible to roll off the assembly line sold for $150,000, which goes to the Achilles Freedom Team of Wounded Veterans (they help injured veterans compete in mainstream athletics), and (ugh) Guy Fieri’s personalized black-with-yellow-striping (ugggggggh) Corvette 427 sold for $270,000 to benefit the Guy Fieri Foundation for Inspiration and Imagination (sound of vomiting up lukewarm chili cheese fries).

All told, GM raised $2.14 million for charity at the Barrett-Jackson auction, so we give them a nice little round of applause for their noble deed. But guys, can you cut thise Guy Fieri partnership crap out? You’re better than that. [via GM]