General Motors head designer Harley Earl’s experiment with the sports car was so tentative that he had it thrown together with standard, off-the-shelf parts, and had a cheap fiberglass body made for it by a boat builder. The slickest thing about this study in design economics was the name he chose, Corvette, and the sleek lines of that fiberglass body. No one ever expected this little side project to be the absolute hit of the 1953 General Motors Motorama Show in New York City, but it was. And so the Corvette was rushed into production just as it stood, and was such a sales flop that it was discontinued two years later. It, no doubt, would have faded into obscurity had GM’s new engineer, Zora Arkus Duntov, not convinced the head office to give it another try with their new small-block, V8 engine and a manual transmission. And with that, the Blue Flameout was on its way to becoming an American legend.
