In some ways, the history of the Corvette closely mirrors the post war history of the American Auto industry and yet, it was a vehicle unlike any other. In the 47 years since the first example rolled off the early makeshift production line in Flint, Michigan, there have been no less than five completely different body shapes and countless variants.
In all, over one million Corvettes have been built and it is estimated that as many as 90% of them still survive. This makes it far and away the most popular sports car in history and yet very few of them ever found their way to Europe. Of all variants there are probably less than five hundred carsin the UK. Restoration of the older cars is hugely popular in the USA and, generally speaking, the older the car, the more it is worth however there are some big steps in the value game and you have to know EXACTLY what you are looking at. With the rise of the NCRS (National Corvette Restorers Society), collecting and restoring Corvettes has become BIG business. The scarcer variants change hands for exorbitant prices and you really need to do some research if you are serious about getting involved. NCRS has a UK chapter and they can be found at www.ncrs.co.uk. Alternatively, CCC UK (the classic corvette club) can be found at www.corvetteclub.org.uk. CCC and NCRS have not always gotten along, although they seem to be a bit friendlier towards one another these days. The NCRS guys are, by their very nature, fanatical about returning Corvettes to their original condition. The CCC guys just enjoy their cars. Both clubs are friendly and helpful and I would advise that you join ‘em both if you are interested in getting involved.
As a general rule (there are one or two exceptions), cars built after 1971 are not really “collectable”. 1972 saw the end of big-block production and the move to catalytic converters and unleaded fuel, which meant lower compression ratios and less power. The last of the real fire breathing heavy metal monsters rolled out of St Louis in 1970/71 but ’72 cars are still marginally valuable. The joke goes that the ’70 cars were so environmentally unfriendly they came complete with a “Sod the Whale” sticker in the rear window! However, all of this was twenty years in the future when the first limited run of 300 cars was produced in Flint in ’53...
Head of design at GM in 1952 was Harley Earl, famously known as “Mist’Erl” (listen to “Was a sunny Day” by Paul Simon for the correct pronunciation). That year, in America, over four million new cars were registered. Only eleven thousand were sports cars. It seemed that America did not want, or need sports cars and yet, Harley’s two sons Jerry and Jim, like most teenagers at the time, were besotted with them. The problem was that almost all sports cars were expensive European imports. Earl thought that perhaps there might be a niche for a relatively low-cost American sports car. He very much admired the Jaguar XK120 of the day and this was the car that he used as the benchmark for the very first Corvettes.
While GM was a fantastically successful company, it was not in the business of speculatively investing millions of dollars in a radical product, which might well fail. This meant that the new, low volume sports car would have to be a “parts-bin special”, as they are known in the industry, using as many existing components as
possible in order to keep costs down. The Corvette would have been produced with a conventional steel body, but for the fact that the tooling required to press the body panels would have been too expensive so Earl and his team turned to the (then) relatively new process of moulding the panels from glass fibre. As a result, every Corvette ever produced has had a plastic body shell and this is one of the reasons why so many have survived. Glass fibre doesn’t rust.
Earl wanted a V8 motor for his new baby but only Cadillac, Buick and Oldsmobile produced them at the time and since the new car would appear under the Chevrolet soubriquet he had to make do with the ageing “Blue Flame” in-line six cylinder Chevy unit. It had originally been designed in 1941 as a truck engine and quite frankly, it was a shit motor. In standard trim the 235 cubic inch unit (about 4 litres) gave a measly 115 horsepower. However, the Chevy engineers managed to get it up to 150 hp for the Corvette. By comparison, the XK120 delivered 180 hp from its smaller 210 cubic inch unit. Jag 1, Chevy nil.
Earl also wanted a manual gearbox, just like Jaguar, Austin Healey and Mercedes but none existed in GeneralMotors at the time. Instead he was forced to use the bog standard two-speed “Powerglide” automatic box. He and his staff attempted to console themselves with the notion that Americans didn’t want to have to change gear anyway! Jag 2, Chevy nil!
The first car rolled off the production line in July 1953. The American public was underwhelmed. The first batch of 300 was virtually hand built and the quality was, to put it mildly, crap. They were modified on the line as they went along so no two cars were identical. You could only have them in one colour, white with a red leather interior and they notionally cost $3513 or $150 more than an XK120 (the original target price had been half that of the XK). I say notionally because Joe Public couldn’t buy one even if he wanted to. The first 250 were offered (only 183 of which were actually sold) to well-known celebrities and business people in order to attract as much publicity as possible. The rest were kept back to be trailered around the country, appearing in dealership showrooms for a few days before being moved on. Today, crap as they were, a 1953 car is worth telephone numbers.
The ’53 Corvette did 0-60 in 11 seconds and had a top speed of 105 mph. The XK120 was a full second quicker to sixty and could hit 130. Game, set and match to Jaguar. God, they must have been pissed in Michigan when they saw those numbers come up. The Vette didn’t even have wind-up windows but had to make do with fabric side-screens like the little low-budget MG’s. To add insult to injury the car leaked water at the top of the windscreen. In 1953, three and a half grand was a lot of money for what amounted to a kit car. To be frank, they were bloody lucky to see 1954!
In May 1953, a month before production started, Chevrolet hired a brilliant engineer named Zora Arkuss-Duntov; he was to become the father and saviour of the Corvette. Not a young man, he was 44, he would nevertheless nurse the Corvette and fight its corner for the next 22 years. Production moved to St Louis over Christmas 1953. The new plant had the capacity to produce 10,000 cars per year but only three and a half thousand came off the line in ’54, of which less than three thousand were sold, a tiny, tiny amount in the booming US automotive industry of the mid-fifties. Chevy were left with over a thousand unsold cars on their hands on January 1st 1955. The future looked bleak indeed.
In 1955, the Corvette finally got its V8 motor and optional three-speed manual gearbox. It transformed the car. The 265 cubic inch unit (about 4.3 Litres) was some 40 pounds lighter than the Blue Flame engine it replaced. It brought the 0-60 time down to 8.0 seconds and lifted top speed to 120 mph. Unfortunately, by this time the damage had already been done. That year Ford sold over 16,000 examples of its Thunderbird (the Corvette’s most obvious US competitor, ironically also built to challenge the XK120), while the Corvette achieved just 675. The management at GM were beginning to contemplate the unthinkable – the car was getting very close to being shitcanned. Help was about to come from the strangest place of all – The Ford Motor Company! In 1956 Ford put rear seats into the T-bird…
In order to understand why, you have to know a little about the American middle class culture and values of the time. The T-Bird was squarely pointed at the American youth market. Most young Americans came from fairly conservative, devoutly Christian backgrounds, one of the consequences of which was that unchaperoned dating was generally frowned upon. With a four seat car you could double date (a much more acceptable practice in the eyes of most 1950’s American parents) with a two-seat car the best you could hope for was to give your buddy a ride to the dance! Changing the Thunderbird to a full four-seat convertible worked for Ford and sales continued to grow. However, at the same time, it also left the Corvette as America’s ONLY true sports car and, effectively, defined Chevrolet’s niche for them. Coupled to the fact that enthusiasts were beginning to go racing with the car now that it finally had a decent engine, things slowly began to improve. In ’56, three variants of the V8 motor were offered, the most powerful of which, kicked out 240 hp. The car was now quick by any standards and it began not only to compete in races but also to win. The legend was finally growing and the petrol heads began to buy Corvettes. By 1962, when the C1 was about to be replaced by the all-new C2 the most powerful variants were putting out 360 hp from their 327 cubic inch “fuelie” (fuel injected) motors. These were seriously quick cars, even by today’s standards. In ’62 they must have been rocket ships!
1963 saw the release of the C2 “mid-year” cars, to many aficionados the best of all of the Corvette marques. The C2 didn’t just have a series of engine variants but two entirely different engines. The 327 (later 350) motor and its hundreds of variants was known as the Chevy “small block”, assuming that you can get your head around the idea of a 5.7 litre motor being “small”! However, the C2 was also available with the GM Mark IV, or “big-block” motor. In its initial Corvette guise it had a displacement of 427 cu in and the most powerful variant gave a conservative 425hp. This was one very serious motor indeed. Duntov hated it. His vision for the Corvette was to move towards very light, very powerful motors in order to compete with the Europeans on their own terms. The Mark IV was a big, cast iron, seven-litre monster. Duntov wanted lighter motors with more aluminium in them to keep weight down. Such engines were produced in limited quantities, but only for racing purposes. The average American buyer valued handling a distant second to “off-the-line” performance and wanted power, and lots of it, as cheaply as possible. The Mark IV gave them just that. The term “heavy metal”, which later became associated with rock bands, was coined to describe the big-block and similar motors like it from competitors such as Ford and Chrysler. The era of the muscle car had arrived and the race was on to produce more and yet more powerful motors. The small block car was, in truth, a much sweeter overall package with good (for the time) handling and outstanding braking (the C2 had all round disk brakes). However, the legend was building around the big-block. The 0-60 time for a 1966 427 in its wildest guise was under five and a half seconds. Off the lights, it would blow anything into the weeds. Even today there isn’t much, German and Italian Supercars excepted, that can live with a 427 in a straight line.
In 1968 Chevy released the C3. Known colloquially as the “Shark” or the “Coke Bottle” Corvette owing to its pinched waistline, it was the victim of serious under-development and it was justifiably “panned” by the press. Car & Driver, probably the most influential auto magazine in the US at the time, refused to test the car on the grounds that it was so under-developed as to be unsafe! What had gone wrong?
Well firstly, Duntov and his team had wanted a mid-engined car to replace the C2 but GM wouldn’t let them have the money. This meant that they wasted a lot of time on designs that were, in the end, stillborn. The replacement for the C2 had originally been scheduled for 1967 but Chevy was preoccupied with the delivery of the brand new Camaro which it urgently needed to compete with Pontiac’s GTO and Ford’s Mustang. The C3 would have to wait another year. The only possible option left to the Corvette team was a concept car designed by Larry Shinoda in 1964. Known internally as the XP-830 and to the world as the Mako Shark II, it had been widely shown and photographed since its debut at the New York International Auto Show in 1965. It probably should never have been built but it became the most successful Corvette of them all remaining in production for fourteen years.
This car more than any other epitomises the American Dream. It was envisaged at the height of the space race and, as a result, has an incredibly NASA’esque feel to it. I am sure that you will know what I mean. The car was, in truth, a bit of a bugger’s muddle. It was a designer’s flight of fancy, never intended to fulfil the role of an every-day motorcar. For example, the roofline was so low that the seats had to be inclined at an angle of thirty degrees to accommodate the average American driver. The car is physically big but has almost zero useable space in it. It has no boot (just a space behind the seats), the driver and passenger are cramped together shoulder to shoulder as a result of the pinched waistline and the rear three quarter vision is almost none-existent due to the heavily buttressed C pillar. Aerodynamically the car is a nightmare and the front is only kept down at speed by the almost hidden chin spoiler and upswept “duck’s ass” at the rear. As if all this wasn’t enough, they had to chop holes in the chin of the car at the last minute when they realised that they hadn’t made enough provision for engine cooling. Oh, and did I tell you that it’s one of the most beautiful cars ever built?
Amazingly, by the end of ’68 they had pretty much bottomed all of the teething troubles and Car & Driver readers voted it the best car of ’68 in their annual survey. The irony did not go unnoticed in St Louis! Better still, the car sold in surprisingly high numbers due largely to its drop dead gorgeous lines. As an aside, almost all of the NASA astronauts drove C3 Corvettes, which helped sales enormously. Rumour has it that Chevy let them have them on extended “loan”.
1968 and 1969 saw the hottest Vettes of them all, the L88 and the truly awesome ZL1. Here, finally, were Duntov’s aluminium motors in all their ferocity. These cars were built for one reason and one reason only, to blow the doors off anything else in existence at the time. The aluminium headed L88 and the all-aluminium ZL1. Intended purely for racing, both engines were deliberately under-rated by the factory and quoted as giving an identical 430 hp in a belated attempt to keep the engines off the streets. In fact the L88 typically gave over 500 hp while the ZL1 gave close to 600 and weighed 100lbs less than its iron equivalent. The truly frightening thing is that your grandmother could have bought one! Mercifully, due to the price uplift of $1032 for the L88 and a staggering $3000 for the ZL1, only 116 L88’s and just two ZL1’s were sold to the public in 1969. The L88 could blitz the 0-60 run in 4.2 seconds and blast through the 100 mark from a standing start in just 8 seconds. Even big motorbikes can’t do that. I can’t find any numbers for the ZL1, which is probably just as well.
In 1969 John DeLorean was appointed Chevy Divisional General Manager and power was the watchword. The publicity generated by the outrageous 427’s made them the undisputed kings of the freeway. However The US Government was beginning to see things differently. It finally dawned on somebody somewhere that more Americans had been killed in caraccidents than in all the wars that they had ever fought put together. Legislation was coming and it would be swift and merciless! In December 1970, Congress passed the Clean Air Bill. It established new standards, specifying fuel-economy and emission levels that the big V8’s could never meet. In 1971 OPEC fell out with its customers and the oil crisis began. It was the formal end of the muscle car era.
The swansong for the big-block was the 1970/71 LS5. The LS5 was a 454 cubic inch (7448 cc) monster, the largest engine ever to appear in a Corvette however it actually gave a little less power than the 427’s of the year before, being rated at a conservative 390 hp by the factory. In 1972 the compression ratios were lowered in preparation for unleaded fuel and, with the consequential losses in power, the game was over.
Over the following years Corvettes got fatter and slower. By the mid-seventies, choked with emission control gear, they were putting out a feeble 200 hp. As technology advanced, the cars gradually began to produce more and more power and the present day C5 is, by all accounts, a fine motorcar but for me the dream ended in 1971…
My Corvette, XHH 58H is a 454 LS5. She rolled off the line in St Louis in April 1970. Number three thousand and some of only five and a half thousand big blocks produced that year, she was one of the last of the high compression, nutter bastard, heavy metal Corvettes ever built. The original owner ordered the car with low ratio diff and gearbox. This means that XHH is optimised for out and out acceleration rather than top-speed. When new she would smoke the 0-60 run in a shade under 5.0 seconds, just a little slower than a modern day Porsche 911 Turbo. Imagine how that must have felt in 1970. Thirty-three years old next birthday, she’ll still blow the doors off just about anything away from the lights. Although, I must admit that the 9 miles she does to the gallon hurts a bit!
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Great op! great car. well done on the review. keep up the god work
richardcatling777 24.10.2004 18:57
Lots to read especially on the history of corvettes, nice one.
tazracer 25.08.2003 10:01
Hi! Like the op. I myself have a '76 L82 smallblock. I estimate about 15 mpg with this car on a good run. From standard guise this mouse motor has been tweaked slightly, and I am now doing a respectable 14.7 on the standing quarter. Happy "Vetting". Tazracer.........
very helpful by (100%):
