1954 Chevrolet Corvette
The Chevrolet Corvette is a sports car first manufactured by Chevrolet in 1953. It is built today exclusively at a General Motors assembly plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, U.S.A.. It was the first all-American sports car built by an American car manufacturer.
The National Corvette Museum is also located in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The Corvette is widely regarded as "America's Sports Car" and for more than 50 years, Corvettes have combined very powerful engines and affordability, especially when compared with more prestiguous marques of similar abilities.
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 are widely seen as being much improved in these areas.
Corvettes tend to emphasize simplicity over technical complexity. Where nearly all competing marques rely on smaller displacement, more complex engines, the Corvette uses a simpler overhead valve (OHV) design coupled with a larger displacement. The result is often both lighter and physically smaller than the more complex arrangements, as well as cheaper to manufacture.
Another example of this philosophy is the continued use of transverse leaf springs in the suspension. This lack of sophistication is sometimes viewed as a negative by automotive purists, and has fueled the aforementioned "lack of refinement" argument.
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.
1957 Chevrolet Corvette Roadster
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. Earl convinced GM that they needed to build a two-seat sports car. 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, maneuverable fighting frigate (the credit for the naming goes to Myron Scott), the first Corvettes were virtually handbuilt 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 fiberglass, 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 Powerglide automatic transmission, and drum brakes from Chevrolet's regular car line.
Though the engine's output was increased somewhat, thanks to a triple-carburetor intake exclusive to the Corvette, performance of the car was decidedly lackluster. 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 marque, 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.
Fuel-injected models were identified by badging on the side scalloping in the front fenders. Fuel-injected models were identified by badging on the side scalloping in the front fenders. GM was seriously considering shelving the project, leaving the Corvette to be little more than a footnote in automotive history, and would have done so if not for two important events.
1958 Chevrolet Corvette Roadster
The first was the introduction in 1955 of Chevrolet's first V8 engine (a 265 in³ {4.3 L}) since 1919, and the second was the influence of a Soviet emigré in GM's engineering department, Zora Arkus-Duntov. Arkus-Duntov simply took the new V8 and backed it with a three-speed manual transmission. That modification, probably the single most important in the car's history, helped turn the Corvette from a two-seat curiosity into a genuine performer. It also earned Arkus-Duntov the rather inaccurate nickname "Father of the Corvette."
Another key factor in the Corvette's survival was Ford's introduction, in 1955, of the two-seat Thunderbird, which was billed as a "personal luxury car," not a sports car. Even so, the Ford-Chevrolet rivalry in those days demanded that GM not appear to back down from the challenge. The "T-Bird" was changed to a four-seater in 1958.
Source: Wikipedia
Classic American Muscle Cars
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