June 30, 1953: Corvette Adds Some Fiber, Flair to American Road

Tuesday, 30 June 2009 06:00

June 30, 1953: Corvette Adds Some Fiber, Flair to American Road

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1953: Chevrolet introduces the Corvette. It’s a time when “new” and “Space Age” are the big buzzwords, and the Corvette fits the bill.

The Corvette featured a gorgeous body made entirely of a new wonder material called fiberglass, and it was the first production car made of the stuff.

There is only one truly American sports car, and it is the Chevrolet Corvette. Oh sure, the Shelby Cobra is very nice and mighty quick, but it has an American engine in an English chassis. The Dodge Viper is a fitting example of how brute horsepower and big tires can overcome a chassis that isn’t terribly sophisticated. So if you want a real sports car that’s also a real American, there’s only the Chevrolet Corvette.

The Corvette was born of the boom years following World War II and was a response to the growing popularity of the small, nimble two-seat sports cars American GIs brought home from Europe. Legendary GM designer Harley Earl designed the car, and GM ad man Myron Scott named it (after a class of fast, compact, powerful warships). Fiberglass offered a car that was lighter — and more futuristic — than one made of steel.

The first Corvette (and the next 14) rolled off the end of an “assembly line” in the back of a converted GM garage in Flint, Michigan. Later cars came from a purpose-built plant in St. Louis. That factory had an eventual capacity of 10,000 cars a year, but the first year’s production was limited to just 300.

The hand-built ’53s were all uniform, to allow workers to concentrate on working with the new material instead of hassling the trim and options. They were all painted Polo White with Sportsman Red interiors, black tops, whitewall tires and analog instruments — including a 5,000-rpm tachometer. Suggested retail price was $3,513, equivalent to about $28,000 in today’s money.

Although the first-generation Corvette looked like a sports car, it didn’t drive like one. The six-cylinder truck engine was as sluggish as the drum brakes were weak, and the car came with a two-speed automatic transmission. Hardly sports-car stuff.

Two things saved the car from almost certain death. The first was Chevrolet’s introduction in 1955 of the small-block V-8 engine, which gave the car some stones, and the arrival of engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov, who gave it some heart. GM named him the director of high-performance-vehicle design, and he gave the Corvette its performance pedigree. That’s why he is called the father of the Corvette.

Soon the Vette (as it has always been known) was sporting ever bigger, ever more potent (and ever more gas-guzzling) V-8 engines. Suspension upgrades like a fully independent rear suspension and disc brakes on all four corners made the car a real runner. That worried big-time European sports car manufacturers like Jaguar and Aston Martin, both on the road and on the track.

Race-trimmed Corvettes driven by the likes of Roger Penske, A. J. Foyt, Jim Hall, and Dick Guldstrand were outright terrors on the track. Owning the podium at tracks like Nassau, Stardust, Riverside and Laguna Seca in the New World, they were always a factor at European tracks like Le Mans and Spa.

The Corvette Grand Sports were more than a match for the Cobras until Shelby dropped in the 427. The Vettes were also crushingly effective against cars like Jag XKEs, Astons, Healeys and any road-going Porsches of the time.

More than that, though, the Corvette became an icon. To call it a cultural landmark is a gross understatement. The car has been immortalized in countless movies and songs — even if Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” isn’t really about the car. It’s worth noting that the salient point of “Deadman’s Curve” by Jan & Dean wasn’t the car wreck; it was the fact that a Corvette Stingray was beating the hell out of a Jaguar XKE.

The car has been restyled six times over the years — and every Corvette aficionado has a favorite era — but the car has stayed true to its sports car heritage. There have been some dark years, not the least of which were the “malaise” years of the 1970s that saw the car weakened by tightening emissions rules and rising fuel prices. The low point was 1975, when the base model Corvette put out just 165 horsepower.

Yet the Corvette always kept pace with the sports car world: offering fuel injection in the 1960s, more and more refined suspension technology that filtered from the track to the street over the decades, using composite structures as suspension members on a production car, and sophisticated aerodynamic tuning of the fiberglass body.

Nowadays, even as GM falters, the Corvette remains one of its crown jewels and a formidable sports car. The top-of-the-line Corvette ZR1 may be the best yet. With 638 horsepower and a top speed of 205 mph, the most powerful Vette ever can run with the best from Tokyo, Stuttgart and Maranello.

The Corvette is built at a dedicated factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where a sign over the entrance reads, “Through these doors walk the finest auto builders in the world.” A lot of people in Japan, Germany, Italy and England — and right here in the United States, for that matter — would disagree. But the Corvette remains the pinnacle of American sports car design.

And they’re still made of fiberglass.

Source: Various

Photo: The very first Corvettes roll off the assembly line at the Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan. (Bettmann/Corbis)

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