Photography Credit: Peter Brock
During the spring of ’57, American performance cars of all types were at a new height of popularity. Employees from the Big Three automakers–GM, Ford and Chrysler–were taking their latest out on Woodward Avenue to compare and show off what they could do.
Executives were getting concerned about the scene and the potential for liability issues. The horrific crash at Le Mans in 1955 was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Executives were also taking a hard look at what they were spending on sanctioned racing in NASCAR and the NHRA.
At the same time, Harlow Curtice, president of GM, was looking at what was being spent on the Corvette SS program, the result of which was a race car that had lasted just 23 laps. He decided the expense wasn’t worth it to GM’s bottom line.
The members of the Automotive Manufacturers Association, primarily America’s Big Three, were talking. Then came the Virginia 500 on May 19 at Martinsville Speedway, where a Mercury Meteor crashed into the grandstands and injured five people, including a young boy.
It hadn’t been too hard to convince top management in each of these companies that they could all save vast sums–and possible future legal entanglements regarding “speed-related incidents”–if they collectively agreed to limit or even stop supporting all performance activities. The now infamous “AMA ban” was instituted, eliminating all factory-supported racing.
On June 6, all factory-supported NASCAR teams were officially cancelled as American auto manufactures withdrew their support. The SS’s much photographed appearance at Sebring had created sensational headlines in the sports pages of The Detroit News, which were soon noticed by Curtice and others in GM’s top management. The whole SS program was ordered to cease immediately. Even verbal directives were given to have the car destroyed!
Over the four years Zora had already worked at GM, he’d become wise enough to realize that corporate inefficiency could allow any thing or event to become forgotten. Time was his proven ally. He knew when the SS had truly “disappeared” from sight anywhere within GM’s confines that top management would assume that their directives had been followed. Zora saved the SS immediately after Sebring by hiding it.
Some 10 years later, he donated it to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, where it resides today–another piece of GM racing history that never began its development stage before corporate politics destroyed its chance at greatness. It wouldn’t be the first such dream to die at the directives of top management, but it remained a warning example to all the true believers within the Corvette program for many years to follow.
This included Bill Mitchell, who took control of GM Styling when Earl retired in ’58. Mitchell used to say he had “gasoline in his veins” and wasn’t about to let the Corvette program die.
Upon returning from the Turin Auto Show in Italy later in ’57, he walked into Studio B, where I worked with three other young designers, and showed us photos of several Italian sports cars that he wanted us to use as the inspiration for a new generation of Corvette.
Knowing what happened with the SS, he had a false wall built in a studio tool room. Behind it, a secret design studio was built.
There, away from the prying eyes of curious GM executives, the iconic second-generation Corvette was designed. A full-size clay model was sculpted in this secret room while an impatient Mitchell waited until support for the AMA ban eased and he was finally allowed to pursue his new production sports car, the 1963 split-window Corvette Sting Ray.
Peter Brock’s award-winning “Corvette Sting Ray: Genesis of an American Icon,” available via Amazon or bre2.net, covers Bill Mitchell’s secret Corvette skunk works and more.