The Corvettes That Never Were: With all due respect to the Dodge Viper, the Corvette is America's sports car
By Frank Markus
Photography by David Freers
http://motortrend.com
Concept Corvettes: 1959 Sting Ray, 1973 XP-895 Reynolds, 1977 Aero-Vette, 1990 Cerv III, 1992 Sting Ray III
It was our first one and it was our only one for way too long, so it got as tightly woven into the fabric of our nation as television, the microchip, and the space program. National pride may explain why generations of American car enthusiasts, even though most could never own one, have taken such an inordinate interest in the Corvette. For a half-century, General Motors has fed this insatiable fascination with a steady stream of concept cars, leaked drawings, and unofficial factory rumours, each of which could be relied upon to produce a flurry of magazine covers asking the timeless question "Is this the new Corvette?"--Motor Trend's included.
Most of these pinup fantasies never lived to leak oil on suburban driveways, but each has an interesting story to tell. Many established new trends in sports-car styling. Some explored technological dead-ends. Some great ideas got ash-canned when their champions lost corporate political battles or ran afoul of the cost accountants. All have interesting tales, and many are still around to tell them.
Part 1 In a Six Part Series[/b]
So, now, let's pry open the doors of GM's Heritage Museum and take a drive in five of the world's most storied Vette prototypes and concepts.
Light, agile European sports cars began making inroads in the U.S. just after WWII, but few of the decision-makers in Detroit had ever driven one. Fewer still were interested in shifting resources away from the big, profitable sleds the public was voraciously buying in the early 1950s. Design chief Harley Earl was an avid sports-car fan, however, and he wielded enough power within GM to have his own secret sandbox. In 1952, his team holed up in that box and built the EX-122 show car, named it after a fast Royal Navy warship, and put it on display in December as one of the dream cars at the GM Motorama auto show in New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Audience reaction was so overwhelming that the car was rushed into production by June 1953.
That it survived its first few years is largely thanks to a Russian Motorama attendee born in Belgium. Zora Arkus-Duntov loved the Corvette's design but was so bothered by its pushrod-six-cylinder, two-speed automatic drivetrain that he talked his way into a job at GM. Within a few years, Corvettes were winning races and the sporty-looking slowpoke had earned its reputation as America's sports car.
Part 2
1959 Sting Ray
The man behind most of the Corvette concept cars that graced magazine covers throughout the 1960s and 1970s was Harley Earl's successor, Bill Mitchell. This son of a Pennsylvania Buick dealer grew up racing sports cars on the East Coast, so he took an intense interest in the Corvette. The second-generation (C2) car of 1963 was his, and its design first appeared on the Sting Ray racer of 1959. Mitchell built the Sting Ray because he believed deeply in the value of racing. After the Big Three banned factory racing in June 1957, he talked management into letting him race using his own money, and he purchased an exotic Corvette SS tube-frame chassis (for $1) that had been prepared to race at Le Mans. The only condition? He had to rebody it so it wouldn't be mistaken for a Corvette, SR2, or SS racer.
Mitchell and young styling recruit Larry Shinoda sequestered themselves to the basement and designed a unique new shape. It made its public debut at Maryland's Marlborough Raceway on April 18, 1959, powered by a 283-cubic-inch small-block with experimental 11:1 compression aluminium cylinder heads and took fourth place with Dr. Dick Thompson "The Flying Dentist" at the wheel. It raced through 1960 wearing only "Sting Ray" badges, before retiring to tour the auto-show circuit in 1961.
1959 Sting Ray
General Motors has restored the Sting Ray to its show-car brilliance, but listening to the Rochester-injected 283 snarl through mostly open side pipes and watching the rear tires jerk and skid in tight turns, thanks to the welded differential, one marvels at the notion of Bill Mitchell using this car as daily transportation in between races. But slip into the metallic-silver driver's bucket and there's less bite than bark. The engine starts readily and idles evenly. Engage the unsynchronized first gear with a click of the clockwork-precise shifter, release the pedal to smoothly engage the clutch, and you're off--straight-cut gears whining and side pipes howling. It's so docile that even Elvis could drive it--which he did in his 1967 movie "Clambake." With roughly 300 horsepower pulling only 2150 pounds of Sting Ray, it's easy to see why Mitchell was only too happy to put up with the wind rushing over the short screen and directly into his eyes.
[/color]
