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Guy Carpenter was 19 years old in 1967, hanging around Wheeler Chevrolet and saving for a 427 Corvette he never ended up buying. What he got instead may be rarer: a 1969 Camaro Z/28 with roughly 15,000 original miles and genuine Smokey Yunick hardware still bolted under the hood. Yunick’s parts almost never left his Daytona Beach shop on anything he had not built himself. Read on for why an unrestored survivor makes those parts matter so much more.
The Corvette almost didn’t survive its own first decade. Built from fiberglass because postwar steel was scarce, sold in a color palette limited to white, and slower to stop than it was to go, the original 1953 Corvette came close to cancellation before Ford’s Thunderbird forced Chevrolet’s hand. What followed was a rapid string of changes — a real V8, a fuel-injected small-block, a bored-out 327 — that turned an awkward experiment into the car GM couldn’t afford to kill. Read on to find out how it got there.
In 1955 Chevrolet and Ford both launched a two-seat American convertible, and only one of them was seriously trying to build a sports car. The Thunderbird outsold the Corvette by better than twenty to one in the first year alone, which should have ended the argument permanently. Instead it saved the Corvette. Here is how the softer car won the showroom, why GM refused to read that as a defeat, and what happened to both nameplates afterward.
Bolt a modern LS V8 into a 1956 Chevy and you have built a hot rod. Bolt that same body to an Art Morrison GT Sport chassis and you have built something closer to a modern sports car wearing a vintage suit. Frank Devlin built his 210 in honor of the brother who taught him to drive in one, and the engineering underneath is decades newer than the sheet metal above it. Read on for what actually gets replaced, and how much of the original car survives a build like this.
It took roughly fifteen weeks for Chevrolet’s engineers to go from a design sketch to a production-ready V8 in 1954 — and the engine that resulted just kept evolving for the next four decades. This piece traces Chevrolet’s original 3.875-inch bore small-block family from the 1955 265 through the 283’s fuel-injected, one-horsepower-per-cubic-inch milestone, and explains why the bore spacing established back then still matters for identifying engines today. Read on to find out how a rushed 1950s deadline shaped Chevy V8s for generations.
The sixth-generation Corvette started in 2005 as a strong, honest 400-horsepower sports car and ended its run in 2013 as the platform for a 638-horsepower supercharged ZR1 capable of over 200 mph. In between came the track-focused Z06, the value-minded Grand Sport, and a mid-cycle engine upgrade that changed the car’s entire personality. This rundown covers what changed year to year, which variant is which, and what to check before buying one today. Read on to find out where your ideal C6 fits in.