Father of the Corvette wanted a middle child
GM’s desire for a mid-engined Corvette dates back to the dawn of the model
The new C8 Chevrolet Corvette would make Zachary Arkus-Duntov very happy.
The Belgian-born engineer and racing driver (class win at Le Mans and a Pikes Peak record) is known as the “Father of the Corvette”.
Not the creator, mind, because Arkus-Duntov joined General Motors in 1953, after the sports car was launched. Actually, he joined because the sports car was launched: he saw the Corvette at GM’s Motorama show and approached the company about working on it.
As director of highperformance vehicles at GM from
1954, he shaped the Corvette legend, introducing V8 power in
1955 and fuel injection in 1957. And Arkus-Duntov always wanted a mid-engined Corvette.
He was well aware of the shift towards the mid-engined layout in top level competition from the late-1950s. He masterminded the Chevrolet Engineering Research Vehicle (CERV) concept car in 1960, a pseudo-Indy open-wheeler with the engine in the middle, behind the driver.
Not exactly a road car design, but it was later used for testing and handling development. Those lessons were applied to CERV II (1964), a mid-engined allwheel drive sports car that would have worn a Corvette badge and taken on the likes of the Ford GT40 in endurance racing.
As with the original CERV, it was really a passion project, because there had been an American Manufacturer’s Association (AMA) ban on factory-backed racing since 1957; Arkus-Duntov had hoped to circumvent that by having private teams enter the cars. It didn’t happen.
But CERV II was used for further mid-engined development, partly with a view towards a “super Corvette” GM wanted to build.
There came a steady line of mid-engined Corvette concepts through the late-1960s and 1970s, including the XP-880/Astro II, XP882 and even a rotary- powered XP-987. Some guy called John Z. DeLorean authorised an alloy bodied concept in 1972, the XP895.
Arkus-Duntov retired in 1975, but the mid-engined Corvette idea kept moving. The most notable was CERV III of 1990, which obviously paid homage to Arkus-Duntov’s originals but also looked quite production-ready, including all-wheel drive, fourwheel steering and active suspension. But it still wasn’t the right time.
That seems like a good place for The Good Oil to leave it. Although GM certainly didn’t.