Steve Magnante's 1001 Corvette Facts. Steve Magnante

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      226 The May 1955 issue of Motor Trend set tongues wagging with this Rumor Mill column nugget: “The Chevrolet Corvette may drop fiberglass for 1956 production. The excellent quality of current Corvette bodies is achieved at too high a price (not passed on to consumers). Hand finishing of the plastic coupled with a high parts-rejection rate are the trouble-causers. Corvette is in the sports-car field to stay, so steel is the next big step.” Needless to say, it was not to be.

      227 In the October 1956 issue of Hot Rod, writer Racer Brown evaluated an early-production 1957 Corvette equipped with the optional metallic brake linings and wrote, “You just stand on ’em and they bring the car down to smooth, straight-line, nonskid stops from high speeds. We tried this with our test car more than 20 times in a row without any appreciable fade.”

      228 Despite a few cooling-off periods where General Motors voluntarily chose not to publicize Corvette’s winning ways on racetracks across the globe, the very first magazine ad that blatantly depicted a Corvette in sanctioned competition was the famed “Real McCoy” ad of mid-1956. Celebrating Corvette’s first-ever entry in world-class SCCA competition, the ad took aim at the Ford Thunderbird: “Other people make a luxury car that has much the same dimensions as this. That’s not so tough. And the Europeans make some real rugged competition sports cars, and that’s considerably tougher. But nobody but Chevrolet makes a luxury car that’s also a genuine 100-proof sports car. It’s a wicked combination to work out, and we didn’t hit it overnight.” The ad’s main image showed a stripped-down Vette with a grill-less gaping maw, auxiliary driving lights, and racing stripes that forever changed the way Corvette was seen and marketed.

       There’s no doubt that the appearance of Ford’s 1955 Thunderbird halted plans to discontinue the Corvette despite a disastrous 1954 retail showing. That said, the only place for the T-Bird in the SCCA realm was in the spectator parking lot.

229 And about those cooling-off periods: the first arrived on June 6, 1957, in the form of the notorious AMA ban. Certain lawmakers and members of the insurance industry kept a close eye on Detroit’s horsepower war. They felt that the growing emphasis on power and speed encouraged reckless driving, especially among the growing pool of young drivers. So they pressured the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (AMA), an industry lobbying group, to urge automakers to stop promoting performance. Sensing that the “voluntary” nature of the ban hid sharp teeth, Detroit fell in line. Immediate victims were factory-sponsored racing programs in NASCAR, USAC, and SCCA (that means you, Corvette). For its part, NASCAR immediately outlawed fuel injection and supercharging, killing Ford’s one-year affair with the belt-driven McCulloch supercharger and dulling GM’s interest in the Rochester fuel-injection program. Detroit still raced, but efforts had to be covert (under the guise of privateer race teams), and the full-steam-ahead development of high-performance machinery was sadly curtailed. By 1962, after five years of oppression, the youth market had exploded, and baby boomers demanded exciting, fast cars. Henry Ford was the first Detroit executive to declare a return to factory-sponsored racing, and the rest of the industry followed shortly.

      230 Showcasing automobile-accident trends and statistics since 1931 (except during World War II), The Travelers Insurance Companies of Hartford, Connecticut, published an annual booklet titled Heedless Horsepower. The 1957 edition of this 30-page study appeared at the height of Detroit’s infatuation with advertised power ratings and just in time for Corvette’s historic shattering of the 1-hp-per-cubic-inch barrier with the Ram-Jet 283. Heedless Horsepower was packed with grim statistics citing the predictable linkage between youth, speed, powerful cars, and accidents.

      231 Blending fear-mongering propaganda with tragic facts, the 1957 edition of Heedless Horsepower warned, “In the year 1956, [when] the Age of the Automobile came into its own, automobile manufacturers fashioned dreams of steel: powerful, sleek, multicolored models with push-button operation from dashboard to taillight. They killed, maimed, crippled, and destroyed more men, women, children, and property than ever before. We see the reckless young dashing to a date with eternity. State by state, day by day, we can call off the grisly roll: 40,000 deaths, almost 6 percent more than 1955.”

      232 Interestingly, Heedless Horsepower didn’t single out any particular manufacturer. Rather, it used numbers to deliver its sobering, anti-performance message. Statistics comparing 1955 and 1956 included these items: 40,000 deaths, 2,200 more than 1955. In 1956 there were 2.368 million injuries, 210,000 more than 1955. And casualties from speeding totaled 812,750. Pedestrian casualties totaled 233,080, 2,680 more than 1955. Heedless Horsepower also studied when accidents happened and reported that 16,680 deaths occurred on weekends, almost 42 percent of the total. Youth was also at play, with 27.6 percent of the drivers involved in fatal accidents younger than 25 years of age. And in a thinly veiled poke at the vehicles involved in these accidents, the report said, “almost 80 percent of the accidents occurred on dry roads in clear weather,” that “more than 81 percent of the casualties resulted from driver error,” and that “more than 23 percent of the deaths and 28 percent of the injuries occurred between 4 and 8 pm.”

      233 Less than a decade later, consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed arrived in 1965. A non-fiction best seller, the book devoted a chapter to attacking the Corvair (Arkus-Duntov’s juggled tire-pressure fix was discussed) СКАЧАТЬ