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Chevrolet Corvette: Cars
built 448 days ago
The Chevrolet Corvette was the original all-American sports car first manufactured by Chevrolet in 1953. Today this car is built exclusively at a General Motors plant located in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Chevrolet Corvettes carries a long history of melding exceptional handling and brutal amounts of engine power into an affordable package which is most cases, can be as half as expensive as more prominent marques with similar capabilities.
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The Chevrolet Corvette first appeared in 1953 as a unique American entry into the sports car market dominated by European makes. Although not a muscle car by definition, the Corvette used muscle car powertrains and has represented American performance for almost fifty years.
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The Chevrolet Corvette, like each and every sports cars in existence, is designed for sporting performance. It has been contrived to excel by way of acceleration, top speed, braking and maneuverability. For the Chevrolet Corvette to be able to meet and even exceed this particular kind of feat, it is a must for the vehicle to be equipped with parts that would serve it best. It is on these parts which the vehicle will ultimately rely on to be able to deliver.
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Taking its name from the corvette, a small, maneuverable fighting frigate (the credit for the naming goes to Myron Scott), the first Corvettes were virtually handbuilt in Flint, Michigan in Chevrolet's Customer Delivery Center, now an academic building at Kettering University. The outer body was made out of a revolutionary new composite material called fiberglass, selected in part because of steel quotas left over from the war. Underneath that radical new body were standard Chevrolet components, including the "Blue Flame" inline six-cylinder truck engine, two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission, and drum brakes from Chevrolet's regular car line. Though the engine's output was increased somewhat, thanks to a triple-carburetor intake exclusive to the Corvette, performance of the car was decidedly lackluster. Compared to the British and Italian sports cars of the day, the Corvette was underpowered, required a great deal of effort as well as clear roadway to bring to a stop, and even lacked a "proper" manual transmission. Up until that time, the Chevrolet division was GM's entry-level marque, known for excellent but no-nonsense cars.
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The year 1955 brought the single most important development in the history of the Corvette: Chevrolet's brilliant small-block V8. Originally displacing 265 cubic inches, the first small-block was rated at 195 horsepower in the otherwise almost unchanged '55 Corvette (the most notable tweak was the oversize "V" in the lettering along the front fenders). Still saddled with the Powerglide transmission, performance was still less than scintillating (Road & Track had a '55 getting to 60 mph in 8.5 seconds), but the potential was obvious. With many '54 Corvettes still clogging dealer lots, GM restricted production of the '55 model to just 700 cars — all but maybe a half dozen of them being powered by the new V8.
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The first Corvette rolled off the Chevrolet production line in mid-1953. Chevrolet intended the car to compete (in sales) with imported small sports cars. Initially, performance aspects were of secondary importance. Gradually, Chevrolet came to realize that racing success would help showroom sales.
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