By Peter M. De Lorenzo
Detroit. Next weekend marks yet another huge week for the yearlong 60th Anniversary of Corvette celebration, as America’s sports car will be the featured marque at the Rolex Motorsports Reunion at Laguna Seca (Mazda Raceway), this continent’s premier historic racing weekend.
The story of how the Corvette came to be never gets old and I was reminded of this fact by a new book that has just come out, Corvette Sting Ray – Genesis of an American Icon by Peter Brock with other images here, the now-legendary designer who at the age of just 19 came up with the initial sketch that would become the fabulous 1963 Corvette Sting Ray, one of the most iconic cars of all time.
Brock’s story is worth the read, as his sketch was chosen above all others by the mercurial chief of GM Styling – the great Bill Mitchell – in the initial design review for the second-generation Corvette. Remarkably enough, that sketch was then hidden by Brock’s boss to prevent Mitchell from seeing it again in the next design review (in favor of his boss’s own sketch, of course). When Mitchell didn’t see Brock’s sketch on the wall in the second review, Mitchell asked where Brock’s rendering was, at which point Brock’s boss pulled it out of his drawer and pinned it back up on the wall.
In that fateful meeting, Peter Brock learned about the political quagmire that is part and parcel of any corporate design organization, but it would also change his life forever as his initial sketch would trigger the development of one of the most famous cars of all time. (Brock would go on to do myriad great things throughout his career, including designing the iconic Cobra Daytona Coupe for Carroll Shelby.)
The story of the Corvette never gets old because four of the most dynamic legends in automotive history were responsible for making it come to life. Harley Earl, the “father” of the design movement and the man who single-handedly created the business of styling cars; Ed Cole, the brilliant engineer and designer of the Chevrolet small-block V8; Zora Arkus-Duntov, the iron-willed driving force behind turning the Corvette into a legitimate sports car; and of course Bill Mitchell, whose vision, creativity and passion were responsible for keeping the Corvette on its path to glory in spite of daunting odds.
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The Corvette show car is introduced at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York in 1953.
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The 1953 Corvette production car.
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The 1958 Corvette.
Readers of this website are well aware of my relationship with Bill Mitchell by now. The famed designer lived around the corner from our home and because my father was GM’s vice president of Public Relations at the time, Mitchell was always eager to have me ride in his latest styling machines, which he would have delivered to his home every weekend.
I wrote about the experience in the early pages of The United States of Toyota, but suffice to say, I was able to ride in every significant concept car from General Motors in that era, even if it was just to accompany Mitchell on a run up to the drugstore. (Mitchell drove his concept cars on the street most weekends in the spring, summer and fall.) And of course that included riding in my all-time favorite car – the 1959 Corvette Stingray racer – aka the “original” Stingray, which was a cut-down racing roadster interpretation of Brock’s original sketch, done by his friend and fellow GM designer, Chuck Pohlmann.
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The famous 1959 Corvette Stingray racer.
To me, the Corvette Stingray racer remains the embodiment of what the Corvette is and what it should represent. Taut, compact and brilliantly rendered, the Corvette Stingray racer is stunning to this day, a heroic, incredibly emotional expression of power and speed that transcends all eras.
It’s also the all-time favorite car of GM’s current design chief, Ed Welburn, who, in one of his first acts after being promoted to one of the most coveted jobs in this business, rightly ordered that Mitchell’s Stingray racer be restored to its original glory. It now exists as a singular treasure and GM’s most valuable moving monument to its history as an automobile manufacturer.
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The Corvette Stingray racer, still mesmerizing six decades later.
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Bill Mitchell with the '59 Stingray racer and the 1963 Mako Shark concept car. Mitchell was flamboyant, gruff, difficult and supremely talented. He ruled GM Styling with an iron fist but at the same time he inspired his designers to do great work and nurtured them along the way too. He will go down in automotive history as being the master of bringing the "concept car" look to the street in mass-market production cars that were wildly successful. No one did it better. - PMD
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The 1963 Corvette Sting Ray production car. Visually arresting to this day, it remains one of the great production car designs of all time. Note: When Bill Mitchell first named the '59 Corvette racer he dubbed it "Stingray" spelled as one word. When the production car made its debut, "Sting Ray" was spelled as two words. The 2014 Corvette returns the "Stingray" name, using one word.
I’ve had other favorite Corvettes over the years, besides the aforementioned ‘63. Those include the ’57 fuel-injection cars, the ’58, the ’62, the ’67 and the ’69. From the modern era I liked the ’04 and the recently departed 427 roadster. And of course I like the upcoming 2014 Corvette, although I do prefer the roadster much better than the Coupe.
But my all-time favorites were the racing cars. Besides the ’59 Stingray racer, I liked the 1960 Le Mans racers, the ’63 Grand Sports, the ’67-70 L88 cars (including my brother Tony’s famous black ’67 and his other racers), and of course, the factory Pratt & Miller-built racers from the modern era.
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The Briggs Cunningham-entered Corvette team lined up for the start of the 1960 24 Hours of Le Mans. Cunningham entered three cars in the race, although cars No. 1 and 2 didn't finish. John Fitch and Bob Grossman (No. 3 Corvette) ran as high as 7th place overall but ran into cooling issues late in the race. The duo would finish 8th overall and 1st in the GT class. See other images here.
The Corvette is America’s sports car because it has been defining itself for 60 years. Born when this nation was soaring on an undeniable upward trajectory, the Corvette has survived over decades as this country contorted and changed throughout the ensuing years.
Now to be fair, it wasn’t always pretty for the Corvette. In some of those years the Corvette suffered from neglect or was taken for granted by managers focused on extracting every last buck of profit from it. And some of the cars produced under those circumstances were nothing short of abominable.
But make no mistake - the fact that the Corvette has managed to survive all of these years is a notable accomplishment. Many times the Corvette faced extinction due to corporate chieftains who were, ahem, less than favorable to or understanding of the car. Some of these miserable excuses for corporate “leaders” even tried to kill the Corvette outright on occasion, because they just didn’t “get” the car or even care all that much about it one way or the other.
Ultimately, the fact that the Corvette has survived through six decades is a testament to the True Believers, the people inside GM who rose up and saved the Corvette from doom time and again over the decades, just like Bill Mitchell had to do in its formative years. (One of the more famous episodes was when John Z. DeLorean, who was then the freshly appointed General Manager of Chevrolet and self-proclaimed Golden Boy, made a huge internal push to have the Corvette built off of the Camaro platform so that the division could make more money, which would then polish his rising star even further, in his typically self-absorbed estimation. Fortunately, the True Believers emphatically shot him down and the idea never saw the light of day.)
As I’ve said repeatedly in this column, the Corvette is one of only two cars (the other being the Mustang) in modern American automotive history that qualify as true icons in this business. But dealing with that kind of iconic status hasn’t always been easy for GM.
Half the battle revolves around knowing what you have and understanding its place in the automotive universe. That might sound simple but believe me it isn’t. Executives with varying degrees of competence who have been given the marketing reins for the Corvette have come and gone over the years and battles have ensued and mistakes have been made, but the ball more or less has kept moving forward for the Corvette despite the occasional egregious missteps.
It can't be stated enough that it has taken tremendous effort by the True Believers involved in order to maintain the focused consistency that the Corvette has deserved along the way. And they did that while dealing with enormous internal pressures (intermittent incompetence, runaway cost-cutting and the occasional blatant management stupidity) and external pressures (safety, emissions, the green-tinged hordes wielding their self-righteous pitchforks, etc.) that have made it extraordinarily difficult.
And then there was the lingering stereotype that has plagued the Corvette for years, the notion that “it’s a great car for the money” but not quite in the upper echelon of sports cars. Part of that was parochial bullshit consistently spoon-fed by the media and part of it was richly deserved, but that “it’s a great car but…” image has finally begun to change over the last half-decade, and the all-new Corvette that’s coming should finally put paid to that hoary notion.
Needless to say, keeping the Corvette alive – and thriving – over the last 60 years hasn’t always been easy.
But I’m happy to report that he 2014 Corvette positively bristles with everything that the Corvette should be. Emotionally compelling to look at, powerful in its performance, dynamic in its handling and its cat-quick reflexes and smartly executed, I would think Messrs Earl, Arkus-Duntov, Cole and especially Bill Mitchell – the man who refused to let the car die or become an afterthought - would be very proud.
And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.
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The 2014 Corvette Stingray convertible.