Chevrolet Corvette 1953-62

With Harley Earl at the  controls  of General Motors design staff,  auto show “dream cars” came fast and furious during the late Forties and early Fifties. Though indications of these dream machines would often turn up on the production cars that followed, none of Earl’s creations had made the direct leap from auto show to production-until the Corvette.

Huge marketing blitz launched Corvette

Earl’s freshest  baby was  revealed  to the press in the grand ballroom of New York’s Waldorf-Asortia Hotel on January 16, 1953, and the next day it went on public display as part of GM’s 1953 Motorama. In the pre-cable TV era, it is  approximated  that  4,000,000 people eyeballed the show Chevrolet Corvette before the Motorama ended its run.

While legend has it that the groundswell of public acclaim for the Corvette show car proved  General Motors executives to turn it into a production vehicle, the fact is that the fix was on. Even before the Corvette debuted at the Motorama, Earl and Ed Cole, engineering maven,  were moving forward with production plans for their 2-seater.

Creating  the show car into a buildable production vehicle wasn’t easy. After all, it was destined to be a Chevrolet, not a Cadillac, so price was a certain consideration. And to keep the price down to somewhat manageable levels, Chevy engineers knew they had to raid the division’s parts bins, and those bins were absolutely bereft of any exotic componentry. The fact is the Chevrolets of the early Fifties were mundane automobiles, powered by the popular but hardly powerful “stovebolt” six cylinder engine that hadn’t changed much at all since 1936.

Stiffer rail, but rather common otherwise

What the Chevrolet engineers came up with was a stiff, cross-braced boxed-rail frame that was  attached with off-the-shelf front and rear suspension pieces. The front was a rather unsophisticated set-up straight out of Chevrolet sedans, while the rear utilized  semi-elliptic leaf springs to locate the solid rear axle. Steering was equally ordinary–recirculating ball-type with a pokey 16:1 ratio.

Equally pokey was the engine the Chevrolet engineers knew they must modify to use in the Corvette. The Chevy six had an admirable record for durability, but its low-rev, low-horsepower personality was not the stuff of sports car fantasy. Under Ed Cole’s watchful eye, the engineers did an admirable job of attempting to turn the sow’s ear into a silk purse.

To accomplish the feat, they used typical hot-rodding techniques. They fitted  the engine with a new,  slipped in aluminum pistons, longer duration camshaft,  and shaved the head to increase compression ratio to 8:1.  The valvetrain was enhanced  to give the engine higher rpm potential. To clear the low hood, a revised rocker arm cover was installed  with oil filler on the cowl (high) end instead of at the front of the engine.

Carburetors lead to higher  horsepower

However, the biggest change  was in carburetion. Instead of a single carb,  the Corvette engine was fitted with three Carter sidedraft carburetors that sent gas to the cylinders through an alloy manifold. This was a complicated set-up, which required manual chokes, but the improved induction on the intake side coupled with  upgraded  scavenging of dual exhausts resulted in a significant horsepower gain. Instead of 115 horsepower, the “Blue Flame Six” of the first Corvette supplied  150 horsepower at 4500 rpm. Torque reached  at 223 pound-feet.

By today’s standards,  those figures  are unimpressive. A number of economy cars check in with 150 horsepower these days, but in 1953,  the Corvette’s power production compared quite favorably with “true” sports cars like the Jaguar XK120 and the MG TC.

When the Chevrolet engineers’ handiwork was combined with Earl’s fussy but handsome styling, GM executives thought they had a winner. The only problem was,  prospective buyers thought otherwise.

Awful sales led to near death

The  main  issue? The new Corvette was neither fish nor fowl. It wasn’t an American boulevard cruiser with a soft suspension and plenty of luxury highlights, and it wasn’t a sports car in the bare-bones European idiom. It had a relatively short wheelbase and bucket seats, like the Europeans, but Chevy’s Powerglide automatic was the only transmission offered. With a suggested list price of $3,250, the Corvette was almost  double the price of the typical Chevrolet sedan, yet it can only seat two and didn’t even have roll-up side windows. Side curtains were  provided  to keep the weather out of the white fiberglass bodyshell that many derisively dubbed the “bathtub.”

Early projections had optimistically predicted 10,000 sales yearly, but in the maiden year of production only 300 cars were produced. In 1954, production went up considerably, but was still far from the 10,000 mark as sales lagged. Some executives within GM were favored dropping the car when it got new life from two sources,  one from within and one from outside General Motors.

The outside force was the 1955 Thunderbird, Ford Motor Company’s response to the Corvette. With the T-Bird about to hit the market, GM execs weren’t about to give up the two-seater market to their arch rival.

Saved by the small block V8

The inside force was Ed Cole’s brainchild, the legendary tiny  block V-8. Planned for launching in 1955, the small block didn’t simply go on to become one of the most successful passenger car engines of all time, it also rescued the Corvette from extinction.

The small block was precisely  what the Corvette needed. From a displacement of 265 cubic inches, the fresh  engine spun out 195 horsepower at 5,000 rpm, and the infusion of 45 additional horsepower converted the Corvette from a pretender to a contender. When a manual transmission (although a 3-speed) was added late in the 1955 model year, the Corvette could hold its head up against any of the European competition, even from Ferrari.

And surely, while Ferrari had its Enzo, Corvette had its Zora. European-trained Zora Arkus-Duntov had joined GM’s Research and Development staff in 1953 and  rapidly  emerged  himself into the Corvette program. By 1955,  he was one of the main cogs in the wheel, making certain that the car wasn’t simply  a straight-line drag racer but also offered excellent handling, at least in the context of the day.

New design to complement  increased power

When the car was completely re-skinned for the 1956 model year, things just got even better. Not only was the Harley Earl design one of the loveliest and most enduring of its era, the car was also infused with tremendous more horsepower. The base V-8  supplied  210 horsepower and options could bring it up to 225.

Right off the showroom floor,  a 1956 Corvette would jet from zero to 60 mph in just 7.5 seconds, compared to the 12 seconds it would take a Blue Flame Six Corvette to attain the same speed.

And it was speed that rescued  the day for the Corvette. From a plastic pachyderm in impending danger of extinction, the Corvette had become one of the fastest cars in the world.

—© Studio One Networks—

Tagged with: Chevrolet • sports car • top down

Filed under: Top Classic Cars