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Pre-Production Years
The early 1950's brought the US auto market an influx of European autos that
were dominating the road racing scene. While American companies were still
competing, they were hardly competition for the Ferrari's, Alfa Romeo's, and
Jaguar's (not controlled by Ford Motor Company at this time). It was in
September of 1951 that Harley Earl, the chief designer of General Motors at
the time, was working with the latest performance offering from Buick; the
LeSabre. This testing was being done at Watkins Glen in New York, and while
there, Mr. Earl got his first good look at the sheer dominance of the
aforementioned European sports cars, as well as the lack of competition of
the American models. It was around this time that Harley Earl decided that
it was time to get the American cars back into the ring, and he set out on
designing a new sports car. Later that year, an automotive design artist
named Bob McLean was contracted to do something that no one ever had; design
an American sports car with both the performance capabilities and fine
styling of the high end European cars, and keep it affordable. In the early
months of 1952 a prototype was constructed and taken to the track. More to
test the chassis and driveline, they slapped a crude fiberglass version of
the general form of the body they intended to use. However, during testing
the driver lost control and rolled the prototype over. Amazingly, the
fiberglass body held up very well, and it was at this time that the design
team headed by McLean decided that they would make a refined version of this
fiberglass body for the new car. In March of 1952 an independent company,
Naugatuck Chemical, presented their own sports car called the Alembic 1 to
General Motors. Mr. Earl, upon hearing about this put added pressure on the
design team to hurry along the project, and less than a month later, the
team had a full size plaster model or their EX-122. The General Motors
executives were very impressed with the styling and promised performance of
this two seat roadster, and on June 2, 1952, General Motors President Harlow
Curtice and Chevrolet General Manager Thomas Keating agreed on the go-ahead
to begin building a prototype for the 1953 American Motorama. The project
was given the code name of Opel Sports Car, and shortly thereafter, during
the production a public relations expert named Myron Scott, who actually
worked for Campbell-Ewald, GM's advertising agency, changed the name of the
EX-122 to the Corvette, which was a name of a Royal Navy warship. The name
Corvair was originally being considered for the EX-122, but the warship name
carried a certain obvious power. As ordered by the General Motors
executives, the Corvette was ready for the Motorama at the Waldorf Astoria
in New York City on January 17th, 1953. It was introduced to the audience
as the Chevrolet Corvette Dream Car. The Corvette had life. Due to the
positive opinion of the viewers and the media of this Dream Car, the first
advertisement of the Corvette was released that May, and production was to
being the following month.
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