CORVETTE
T H E   A M E R I C A N  D R E A M   C A R!

1963 Shark

1963 Sting Ray Corvette

         On  June 30, 1953, the first production Corvette was built at the General Motors facility in Flint, Michigan.
Here are 5 facts that’s probably not known by many people about the Corvette:
1) The Name Corvette Came From a  Warship.
The Corvette was a naval vessel that was small and fast and used throughout the 1800s and 1900s.  In America, these smaller vessels were known as sloops and were employed during the War of 1812 at the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean against more powerful British vessels.
2) The rarest Corvette Was Made in 1969
Only two of the ZL-1 Corvettes made in 1969 that were equipped with a 427 aluminum engine were sold to the public.  The price tag may have had something to do with it.  While a normally priced Corvette cost $4,781 in 1969, the ZL-1 with its aluminum engine cost $10,048 and had neither a radio or air conditioning.
3) The Fastest Speed Clocked on a Corvette is 212 Miles per Hour.
Tested at an oval track in Germany, the 2019 ZR1 has a 755 horsepower engine and can reach 60 mph in 2.8 seconds.  Timing runs on the track were made both with and without wind, and driving with the wind, the car reached 215 mph.  The ZR1 is produced in Kentucky and comes with a price tag of $120,000.
4) There Were No Corvettes Released in 1983
Forty-three Corvettes were manufactured in 1983; however, all but one of them failed crash testing.  ONLY one of the 1983 Corvettes was kept and is displayed in Bowling Green, Kentucky, at the national Corvette Museum.  Other reports state there were a few more Corvettes produced that year, but if they were, no one knows what happened to them.
5)  The Cheapest Price One could Pay for a Corvette was in 1954 or 1955.
The 1953 Corvette was built by hand the first yer it was manufactured, and the price tag on them that year was $3,498.  In the models produced in 1954 and 1955, assembly lines were used, lowering the cost to $2,274 for both years.  By 1962, the price tag for a Corvette was more than $4,000 while the average cost of a home was $12,550.
     The  greatest single attraction at the 6th. Annual International Automobile Show at the New York Coliseum in the spring of 1962 was a dream car.  GM’s experimental Corvette Shark drew more visitors than any other exhibit.  This may not seem especially surprising in view of the dramatic (like it or not) styling of the Shark until you consider that it was displayed not in the regular Chevrolet area, but in “Car and Driver’s Concours d’Elegance” where it competed with such crowd-catching machines as a front-drive Miller, a Ghia-bodied dragster, the very 1st MG, and an inspiring collection of classic Rolls-Royce, Bugatti, Alfa-Romeo.  Significantly, GM chose to unveil its latest “idea” car at the largest and most complete international automobile exhibition, where it would face competition for attention with virtually every other car produced in the world today.  The Shark proved equal to the challenge.  It also proved that GM is continuing its dream car program with renewed vigor.   The Shark was in every sense a prediction of things to come—the just released 1963 Corvette.  GM has been building dream cars for almost 25 years, an experience that Styling vice-president William L. Mitchell affirms has served them more than adequately in the testing  of public reaction to advanced styling concepts.  The least expensive avenue for proposed innovations is the dream-car route.  an automobile company in effect says to the  public, “This is the direction we could go” But dream cars do much more than take the uncertainty out of public response to upcoming design;   they are more than opinion test surveys.   They are exercises of immeasurable value to the engineers and stylist who are projecting a tangible, concrete expression of future automobiles.
          However, too often curbstone and professional critics view the dream car as too far out, impractical, a downright expensive exercise for the talented geniuses of design and engineering.  Often there lurks the suspicion that the thousands of dollars spent building, testing, transporting and displaying these pampered dreams would be better spent elsewhere and that the companies are slyly writing off the cost in the form of higher prices on production.  America’s most advanced over-the-road experimental dream car the  Firebird III.  To put the dream car program of GM into proper historical perspective,  I present a representative series of dream cars, demonstrating the development of styling trends which, when viewed singularly, may  not have appeared at first blush as logical as history has shown.

Buick Motor Division collaborated with GM Styling in 1938 to build the first dram car, the Y-Job, below.	After the War Buick also contributed to the XP-300 below,right

and the LeSabre

Introduced in 1951, these had supercharged aluminum V8 engines, transaxles and de Dion rear suspension.  Both foreshadowed later Buick styling themes, while the Y-Job and Le Sabre forecast the concealed headlights of the 1963 Corvette.

Two Oldsmobile projections of 1953 and 1954 were the Delta 88 hardtop, below and the 1954 Cutlass sports coupe below.   1954 Corvair Coupe       The Delta 88’s combined bumper and grille later appeared in production, as did its integral wheel and brake drum principle.  Aerodynamic design characterized the Cutlass and  the “Corvair” coupe, above right, also done in 1954.  Both have given names to current models, and their rapid lines live on in the 1963 Corvette coupe.

Some dream cars provide an experience backlog for stylists. Having worked on the 1955 Biscayne,    BELOW⇓	Chevrolet designers were ready to execute the compact Corvair.  Other dream cars move almost directly into production, like the 1954 Chevrolet Nomad wagon.     BELOW⇓	Some dream cars are for fun and excitement, and to test public reaction, like the Buick Wildcat II.  It carried its headlights at the cowl, and was powered by a 220 bhp V8.     BELOW⇓

Designers like the scope of a two-seater layout.  Pontiac’s bold 1956 club de Mer, like Le Sabre, had a transaxle, and de Dion rear suspension.    BELOW⇓	Cadillac’s 1959 Cyclone has a transparent canopy that lifts for easy entry and retracts completely when desired.     BELOW⇓	In the same year GM’s Bill Mitchell’s Sting Ray, on the Corvette SS chassis, was first raced.      BELOW⇓

T H E  N E W   1 9 6 3   C O R V E T T E. BOTH  the Shark and the Sting Ray experimental automobiles contributed to the design of the new Corvette.  When Bill Mitchell designed the Sting Ray, his goal was a sports car “that looked completely American and one that did not owe anything to European spots car designs.”  When the Sting Ray entered national SCCA competition, driven by Dick Thompson, admiring spectators asked Mitchell, “Why don’t you make the Corvette look like that? The 1963 Corvette is a step forward.  In its design there are dram-car touches from the 1954 Corvair (roof and side vents), the Cutlass (tapered fast-back), Le Sabre and Club de Mar (rotating concealed headlamps) and the Sting Ray (hood and fender lines.  Of course to GM  stylists this Corvette is now old-hat: 1965 is current and 1970 is within easy reach.