9781422279557

The 1953 Corvette’s rear styling treatment was distinguished by rocketship tail-light pods, dual exhaust pipes, and an elegantly abbreviated chrome bumper strip. There was also a trunk, an item which would be far from standard equipment in the future.

body Polo White with a Sportsman Red interior, it was a hit of that year’s GM Futurama auto show. On January 1,1954, production facilities were switched over to the St. Louis Assembly Plant. The Corvette was now available in four different colors. It came with courtesy lights, windshield washers, and directional signals. The red-topped, red-trimmed white instrument panel featured a wide-angle gauge display centered around the tachometer. Sales were not great. Corvette was slipping. At this point entered the third member of the triumvirate responsible for nursing the infant machine past its birth pangs. Style studio head Earl and Chevrolet’s Chief Engineer Cole were now joined by motor maestro Zora Arkus-Duntov. Russian-born and Belgian-raised, Duntov was an engineer and auto racer who’d done important work with superchargers in Europe between the wars, later emigrating to the United States. He liked this new Corvette, with its stylish body and untapped potential. He wrote a letter to Cole, saying so. He was an outsider, a walk-in, Cole wound up making him project engineer, that is, Corvette’s Chief Engineer, a position held by Duntov until his retirement some twenty years later. The team was in place. Earl, Cole, Duntov—Corvette’s Big Three. The first move was to drop a 265-cubic inch, overhead V-8 engine into the front of the 1955 roadster. Equipped with a single four-barrel Carter carburetor, it could generate 195 horsepower, finally giving sports car fans some real muscle under the hood. It helped, but was it enough? The crunch was coming, the showdown to determine whether the car would live or die.

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