BY DREW HARDIN (^) I PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY THE GM HERITAGE CENTER
From the Archives
C/Production championship.
Corvette was finally gaining some per-
formance momentum, but within General
Motors, a bit of a public relations issue was
developing. It had to do with Jerome Earl,
son of Harley Earl, then GM’s Vice President
of Design. Jerry Earl was a car guy and a
racer. Problem was, his mount of choice
was a Ferrari 250 MM Spider, which didn’t
sit well with the GM brass.
To remedy the situation, Harley Earl
offered, or maybe demanded, to replace
the Ferrari with a Corvette-based race car.
A production 1956 Corvette was taken from
n its earliest years, the
Corvette’s future was
far from certain. Despite
widespread publicity from
the prototype’s New York
debut in 1953, just 300 cars were built in its
first year. Half of the 3,460 1954 Corvettes
produced went unsold that second year,
and just 700 were made in 1955.
But 1955 proved to be a turning point,
thanks to a new V-8 engine and tireless
efforts by Zora Arkus-Duntov to establish
the car’s competition bona fides. Duntov
hot-lapped the sand at Daytona Beach at
over 150 mph in late 1955 in a Corvette test
mule. Two months later he was back on
the sand, this time with a three-car team
that came away with a First and Second in
the Production Sports Car class and a top-
speed mark for the Modified class.
These wins set the wheels in motion for
Duntov to prep three Corvettes for racing,
first at Daytona Speed Weeks and, a month
later, the 12 Hours of Sebring, where one
of the team cars won its class and finished
Ninth overall. Later that year, a Corvette in
the hands of Dr. Dick Thompson
(the “Flying Dentist”) would win the SCCA
Building the SR-
We count more than a dozen GM engineers feverishly working on the SR-2’s body in a photo dated June 5, 1956.
Modifications were made to the body in the name of slicker aerodynamics.
The nose was lengthened, cone-shaped covers went over the headlights and
a stabilizing fin was mounted to the center of the trunk.
10 VETTE 19.
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