Since unveiling the original American sports car in 1953, GM has upped the ante with each successive model and along the way, the Corvette has evolved from 6-cylinder boulevard cruiser to street racer to Le Mans winner to world-class sports car. Here’s a look back at the history of the Chevrolet Corvette with Corvette Stingray: The Seventh Generation of America’s Sports Car.
Automotive design historians Michael Lamm and Dave Holls say General Motors’ design chief Harley Earl was thinking of his own sons, Jim and Jerry, when he set one of his staffers to work on a small, two-seat roadster poised to become an American competitor to such European sports cars as the MG-TD and XK120 Jaguar. Another automotive historian, Mike Mueller (as well as a display at the National Corvette Museum), says the suggestion came from Earl’s friend, U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay. The general, who oversaw sports car races on the runways of his military bases as a way to boost morale, told Earl that an American automaker should produce a car to compete with those that many World War II veterans had brought home with them from Europe.
Yet another author/historian, David Temple, notes that in September 1951, Earl had driven from Detroit to upstate New York for the sports car races at Watkins Glen. There he led the prerace parade laps to showcase the one-of-a-kind Buick LeSabre, a jet aircraft–inspired convertible prototype GM called an “experimental laboratory on wheels.” But the edge in Earl’s honors at the front of the field evaporated when sportsman and racer Briggs Cunningham chided the GM design chief, because while the Buick could lead the parade, it wasn’t capable of participation in the real race.
Still others have reported that Earl brought home the idea of an American built sports car after seeing the new European models while attending early postwar auto shows in England and France.
Regardless of his motivation, sometime late in 1951, Earl assigned GM designers to work on a Eurostyle two-seater. He also instructed sports car enthusiast Robert McLean to begin work on a Eurostyle two-seater that would provide the basis for an American roadster. He specified investigation into a body made not of steel or aluminum, but rather of the new composite, fiberglass reinforced plastic material already in use for aircraft parts, boat hulls and decks, and other products, including some do-it-yourself sports car kits. Earl brought a Jaguar XK120 into the studio so his team could study the way its components were packaged on a 102- inch wheelbase. That team included Carl Renner, Henry Lauve, Duane “Sparky” Bohnstedt, and Bob McLean, a graduate of CalTech who was both an engineer and industrial designer. Automotive interior designer Joe Schemansky first imagined the Corvette’s twin-cockpit interior.
By the spring of 1952, McLean’s final drawings had been turned into a fullscale clay model and soon after into a fiberglass-bodied version. Chevrolet’s chief engineer, Ed Cole, and general manger Thomas Keating both liked it so much that they showed it to GM president Harlow Curtice.
Curtice liked the car as well. There are reports that Earl—unwilling to leave things to chance—actually showed the car to Curtice for his preliminary approval even before sharing it with Cole and Keating. Regardless of the chronology, Cole, Keating, and Curtice liked the car and approved project EX-122, which became the car’s official and internal name: EXperimental project 122, a.k.a. Project Opel. What Curtice endorsed was the construction of a show or concept car, a “dream machine” to be unveiled and featured in January 1953 in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City as part of the General Motors Motorama.
In the 1930s and early 1940s, General Motors had gone to New York to show its new products to the Wall Street investment community. In 1949, GM opened its Transportation Unlimited show to the public, and more than 300,000 people came to see the new cars and to be entertained by Broadway-style musical numbers. In 1950, GM called the event the Midcentury Motorama, and once again, more than 300,000 people attended. There was no such extravaganza in 1951 or 1952, but for 1953 GM planned something very special for a new version of the Motorama—an event that would show not only the newest GM vehicles, but also a line of futuristic vehicles designed to show what might be driving down the road in the decades to come.
Engineer Maurice Olley oversaw the construction of the Project Opel sports car for the Motorama show. Ed Cole had hired him away from British luxury carmaker Rolls-Royce to lead Chevrolet’s research and development efforts. Olley and his engineering team put McLean’s design—with a final tweak from Clare MacKichan—atop a frame with X-shaped cross members for enhanced rigidity, crucial in a vehicle with no roof and a fiberglass (rather than metal) body structure. While many of the car’s components were salvaged from the standard Chevrolet parts bin, a modern Hotchkiss drivetrain with U-joints was created to send power to the rear wheels. Earl and McLean wanted that power to be provided by a V-8 engine borrowed from either Cadillac or Buick, but their request was denied. Instead, power came from Chevrolet’s workhorse “Blue Flame,” an inline six-cylinder engine, though for the sports car the engine would be topped by a trio of carburetors and tweaked to produce 150 horsepower (42 more than in its typical application). Because of time constraints, however, that power would reach the sports car’s rear wheels through a very unsporting two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission.
The car was unveiled as the Chevrolet Corvette. A French word meaning “fast sloop,” a corvette was a small, fast-moving, highly maneuverable but powerful antisubmarine and antiaircraft warship used by the American, Canadian, and British navies during World War II. But it wasn’t the car’s designers who coined the vehicle’s title—it was Myron Scott, a photographer in the Chevrolet public relations department.
If Cole, Olley, McLean, and the others were ever worried about what the public’s reaction would be, they didn’t have to sweat once Motorama was under way. The Corvette was the star of the show.
In the event the sports car was a big enough hit that General Motors would approve a production version, engineers had been working on a steel body shell. But to capitalize on the car’s sudden and strong popularity (and on the futuristic appeal of the new fiberglass material), corporate officials realized they could launch production earlier by sticking with the show car’s plasticized bodywork. Thus, by June 1953, the first salable Corvettes began production in a section of a Chevrolet assembly plant in Flint, Michigan.
Only 300 of those cars were built for the 1953 model year, and all were painted Polo White with red interiors. To further enhance the car’s sudden fame, the 300 cars were sold only to special customers, especially to celebrities whom GM wanted the public to see driving its new sports car.
With the interest generated by the Motorama and by newspaper, magazine, and newsreel coverage of the celebrities in their Corvettes, Chevrolet anticipated American motorists would buy as many as 10,000 Corvettes (if not more) for the 1954 model year. To meet that demand, the company moved production from the makeshift assembly line in Flint to the Chevrolet assembly plant at St. Louis, Missouri.
To further accelerate interest, the company showed potential new versions of the Corvette at its Motorama show in January 1954, including a hardtop, fastback (the Corvair), and even a station wagon (the Nomad). For 1954, the production Corvette remained an open roadster with a convertible top and removable side curtains instead of roll-up windows, although three more colors—Pennant Blue, Sportsman Red, and Black—were offered, as was a beige-toned interior.
But the demand Chevrolet had anticipated did not materialize. Only 3,640 of the 1954 cars were built, and by January 1955, a third of them still were parked in lots at the assembly plant instead of in the lots of Chevrolet dealerships or in owners’ driveways.
It was an egregious oversight. There were serious discussions about removing the car from production. But then three stars unexpectedly aligned in the automotive constellation: Ford introduced a Corvette competitor, the Thunderbird;Chevrolet developed a new and compact V-8 engine; and a European-born engineer and auto racer who had been among those standing in line to see the first Corvette concept at the 1953 Motorama show convinced GM that he knew how to fulfill the company’s dreams for its sports car.
That engineer and racer was Zora Arkus-Duntov, and he was hired by Ed Colein the late spring of 1953. Before long, he had talked his way onto the Corvette engineering team. He then convinced that team to install the new V-8 engine— tuned to pump out 195 horsepower—in the car, and to link that engine to a threespeed manual transmission.
Fewer than 700 such cars were built for the 1955 model year, but with a new body design—coves sculpted into the body sides and, at last, roll-up windows— and with the V-8 engine now producing 210 horsepower, nearly 3,500 Corvettes were built for 1956. Though sales lagged behind Ford’s new Thunderbird, Corvette production would nearly double for 1957, when fuel injection took the horsepower rating to 250.
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For the Corvette enthusiast, there is no greater source of speculation, pent-up excitement, and anticipation than the pending introduction of a new-generation ‘Vette. Since unveiling the original American sports car in 1953, GM has upped the ante with each successive model and along the way, the Corvette has evolved from 6-cylinder boulevard cruiser to street racer to Le Mans winner to world-class sports car. Sixty years of constant refinement have ensured that the next-generation Corvette will give its global competitors a strong run for their money. For the making of Corvette Stingray: The Seventh Generation of America’s Sports Car, GM granted author Larry Edsall exclusive access to engineers, designers, and other Corvette team members, as well as its own photographic archives, to create the complete inside story of this top-notch sports car. The seventh-generation Corvette (C7) again raises the bar, not only for outright performance but also for performance-for-dollar. Capable of running with – and in many cases outclassing – the likes of Ferrari, Porsche, Audi, and other European legends, Chevy’s newest Corvette delivers the goods with a new look and even more performance technology. With more than 300 historical and behind-the-scenes photographs that take you as close to the car as you can get without sitting behind the wheel, Corvette Stingray is a must-own book for any serious gearhead–whether you’re a long-time ‘Vette junkie, a sports car devotee, or simply an admirer of beautiful machines.
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