1967 corvette stingray

The Corvette is widely regarded as America's Sports Car. For more than 50 years, Corvettes have combined very powerful engines and affordability, especially when compared with more prestigious marquees of similar performance. Older generations of the Corvette have been criticized for being crude and lacking in refinement by European sports car standards, and their on-limit handling is a divisive issue garnering both praise and reproach. Recent generations of the Corvette, however, are widely seen as being much improved in these areas.

• Manufacturer - General Motors

• Production - 1953–present

• Class Sports car

• Body style(s) 2-door coupé

Corvettes tend to emphasize simplicity over technical complexity. Where nearly all competing marquees rely on smaller displacement, more complex and faster-revving engines, the Corvette uses a simpler overhead valve (OHV) design coupled with a larger displacement to make up for the lower rev limit pushrods impose. The result is usually cheaper to manufacture and maintain. Another example of this philosophy is the continued use of transverse leaf springs in the suspension. This is judged as a lack of sophistication by some automotive purists, and has fuelled the aforementioned "lack of refinement" argument.


Early history

While the style of a car may be just as important to some as to how well the car runs, automobile manufacturers did not begin to pay attention to car designs until the 1920s. It was not until 1927, when General Motors hired designer Harley Earl, that automotive styling and design became important to American automobile manufacturers. What Henry Ford did for automobile manufacturing principles, Harley Earl did for car design. Most of GM's flamboyant "dream car" designs of the 1950s are directly attributable to Earl, leading one journalist to comment that the designs were "the American psyche made visible." Harley Earl loved sports cars, and GIs returning after serving overseas in the years following World War II were bringing home MGs, Jaguars, Alfa Romeos, and the like.

In 1951, Nash Motors began selling a two-seat sports car, the Nash-Healey, that was made in partnership with the Italian designer Pinin Farina and British auto engineer Donald Healey. Earl convinced GM that they also needed to build a two-seat sports car. Earl and his Special Projects crew began working on the new car later that year, which was code named "Opel." The result was the 1953 Corvette, unveiled to the public at that year's Motorama car show. The original Corvette emblem incorporated an American flag into the design; this was later dropped, since associating the flag with a product was frowned upon.

Taking its name from the corvette, a small, manoeuvrable fighting frigate (the credit for the naming goes to Myron Scott), the first Corvettes were virtually hand built in Flint, Michigan in Chevrolet's Customer Delivery Center, now an academic building at Kettering University. The outer body was made out of a revolutionary new composite material called fibreglass, selected in part because of steel quotas left over from the war. Underneath that radical new body were standard Chevrolet components, including the "Blue Flame" inline six-cylinder truck engine, two-speed Power glide automatic transmission, and drum brakes from Chevrolet's regular car line.

Though the engine's output was increased somewhat, thanks to a triple-carburettor intake exclusive to the Corvette, performance of the car was decidedly lacklustre. Compared to the British and Italian sports cars of the day, the Corvette was underpowered, required a great deal of effort as well as clear roadway to bring to a stop, and even lacked a "proper" manual transmission. Up until that time, the Chevrolet division was GM's entry-level marquee, known for excellent but no-nonsense cars. Nowhere was that more evident than in the Corvette. A Paxton supercharger became available in 1954 as a dealer-installed option, greatly improving the Corvette's straight-line performance, but sales continued to decline.