11 Fascinating Facts You Never Knew About Corvettes
How Chevrolet's sports car went from an early 1950s show-car to America's supercar killer.
Over eight generations and more than 70 years, the Corvette has been many things: An evocative show car, a world-beating race car, a hairy-chested horsepower beast, and most recently, a mid-engine tour-de-force that can hang with Europe's best exotic cars-all available at your local Chevy dealer. Here's what you need to know about the past, present, and future of the Chevy Corvette, America's sports car.
The Corvette's name comes from naval history. The term refers to small, high-performance warships built for speed and maneuverability. In modern warfare, corvettes are used for coastal patrol, missile launching, and near-to-land offensive attacks. The term has roots in Latin, Dutch and French, and was re-popularized during World War II by Winston Churchill, then serving as the head of the British Royal Navy. Today, the navies of Russia, China, France, Norway, and dozens of other nations include corvettes in their fleets.
The Chevy Corvette was first seen as a show car, the star of General Motors' 1953 Motorama, held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City in January 1953. It was unlike any car that General Motors had ever shown in public: A low, sleek, two-seat convertible, with an elegant body made of fiberglass rather than steel. The Corvette concept car was a smash hit, leading GM to put the model into production in June of that same year.
Born in Belgium, raised in Russia, and trained in engineering in Germany, Zora Arkus-Duntov was the cosmopolitan European who defined the Corvette as America's sports car. Arkus-Duntov had emigrated to the U.S. after WWII, launching a high-performance engine-parts company and racing throughout Europe. In 1953, after seeing the Corvette concept car at Motorama, Arkus-Duntov wrote a letter to Chevy's chief engineer. His suggestions about the Corvette's potential got him hired, and in 1955, Arkus-Duntov succeeded in convincing General Motors to install a small-block V8 in the Corvette, earning him the nickname "the father of the Corvette."
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Source: Bob Sorokanich - RRI
Posted 5/31/24