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When Kim Walker towed two decades-forgotten Corvettes into the 2017 Corvettes at Carlisle show, he figured they’d be an afterthought next to a building full of million-dollar L88s. Instead, these two overgrown Pennsylvania survivors — one still wearing the vegetation that had grown on it for years — became one of the show’s most talked-about attractions. Read on to find out how a barn find beats a restoration, and why Walker’s wife spent four days watering a car.
1957 was the year the Corvette stopped being just a pretty face, and this Polo White Roadster carries the 283-cubic-inch engine option that made the case. Bill Kotzum of Corvette Mike Midwest walks through why the rare, temperamental fuel-injected version briefly made this America’s quickest production car. Ford had an answer of its own that same year. See how the two rivals compared.
This vintage promotional film captures Chevrolet’s original 1953 announcement of the Corvette, a car nobody was certain American buyers actually wanted. Commenters — including some old enough to remember passing on early Corvettes for a few hundred dollars decades later — trace a direct line from this uncertain debut to today’s mid-engine ZR1. Watch the moment a genuine gamble launched what’s become America’s longest-running sports car nameplate.
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.