Since we’ve been on the subject of Powerglide here lately, comparing how it performed against manuals and other automatics, here’s something on the other end of the spectrum from six cylinder sedans. As you undoubtedly know, the Corvette only came with PG in its first three years, but starting in 1956, a new close-ratio three-speed Saginaw unit was the new standard transmission—thanks to Zora Arkus Duntov—and the PG was now optional. R&T tested two of the newly-restyled ’56s, both powered by the optional 225 hp 265 cubic inch V8.
In addition to the restyle, the ’56 with PG was also about 200 lbs heavier than the ’55 w/PG, thanks to improved amenities such as windup windows and a power top, and others. The ’56 with PG only had some 600 miles on it, so it was still “tight”. Between the extra weight and the tightness of the engine, the ’56 PG Vette was a bit slower to 60, but caught up at 80 and beat the ’55 to 100.
VinceC covered the development of the Corvette and its three and four-speed transmissions here in great detail, and this chart he made of these Corvette comparisons is from that post. The three speed manual, with its close ratios, was quicker, especially at the higher speeds. R&T didn’t publish the 0-30 times for both, but did say that the PG car “gets away quicker from a start than the stick-shift”. The manual’s 2.21:1 first gear was a bit high, best suited for racing, which was Duntov’s priority. With a broken in engine, the PG car would likely have narrowed the gap to 60 and the 1/4 mile by possibly as much as 50%.
In any case, the PG Corvette was a very brisk car for the times, when anything under 10 seconds to 60 was fast. And of course the stick shift Corvette was exceptionally quick for 1956, essentially world-class fast, as in faster than the Mercedes 300SL. And if that wasn’t fast enough, an optional Duntov cam bumped the rating up to 240 hp.
OF course only one year later, the fuel injected 283 in the ’57 Corvette and the new 4-speed B/W T-10 transmission (designed by GM) made the ’56 look suddenly slow. 0-60 now came in a breathtaking 5.7 seconds, and the 1/4 mile was blown away in 14.3 seconds. Admittedly, the ’57 did have steep 4.11;1 rear axle gears. It would be some years before another Corvette would be as quick, due to weight gain, as well as any other production car in the world.
The twin four-barrel induction system showed signs of a bit of bogging at take-off. That’s a lot of venturi area for a 4.2 L V8, but the Chevy’s excellent breathing heads were able to take full advantage of them once under way. And it ran cleanly and smoothly to 6000 rpm.
Handling and cornering abilities were deemed “good to excellent”. There was a bit of cowl shake over 100 mph.
Related CC reading:
Automotive History: From Powerglide to 4-speed – The History of Transmissions on Early Corvettes
Vintage R&T Road Test & Tech Report: 1954 Chevrolet Corvette – “Is It Really A Sports Car?”
Automotive History: 1957 Chevrolet Fuel-Injected 283 V8 – Ahead Of Its Time And The Competition
Interesting read. ’56’s seem to be really rare on the ground, as in all my years of antique car shows I’ve yet to see one in the metal, er, fiberglass. In my part of the country (western PA, central VA) I’m left with the feeling that the Corvette didn’t really take off until 1958, because I’ve only seen a few ’53’s, one ’54, one ’55, no ’56’s, and a couple of ’57’s.
Once you get to and past 1958, things get relatively common. Hit 1961 and they start getting really common.
I think people were still trying to figure out what the Corvette was in 1956 – fashion statement or genuine sports car. The fashion statement people and those looking for brute power had other options by 1956, including the Thunderbird, the Chrysler 300 and the Stude Golden Hawk. By 1958 the Thunderbird had changed missions, the 300 was a different niche and nobody took the Golden Hawk seriously anymore. And most of the public had figured out what the Corvette was – a sports car that the driver looked great in.
And most of the public had figured out what the Corvette was – a sports car that the driver looked great in.
I guess the fact that it was the fastest production sports car in the world at a rather affordable price didn’t factor into that?
Quite a number of serious sports car owners who raced their cars (which is what the true definition of “sports car” was at the time) sold their foreign cars and bought Corvettes in 1956 because its performance ability and potential was extremely compelling. There were a very healthy number of amateur ’56s on the tracks that year. The factory was already offering a number of performance suspension, brake, etc. options in ’56,
Cal Club, the big So Cal sports car club (and not a part of SCCA until 1963), had huge fields of largely Corvettes racing in their production car races in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. The wealthy area racers and race car owners could go, and often went, Ferrari, Porsche or Maserati. But the Corvette was such a good deal for sports car racing, all the way around (think local mechanics for crews rather than specially trained mechanics, and off-the-shelf parts instead of exotic stuff shipped over from Europe). Those early V-8 Corvettes hit the sweet spot between the origins of So Cal sports car racing, and the later bifurcation of the sport away from the wealthy gentleman racer into either professional programs or resolutely amateur, low key, weekend warrior racing. The Shelby Cobra roadsters showed up, to compete with the Vettes, at the tail end of the Corvette era of So Cal amateur sports car racing in 1963. (The ‘63 Sting Ray was also a more complex and expensive beast to race, unlike the dirt simple earlier versions through ‘62, especially in the suspension and bodywork departments).
To clarify, I said “most of the public”. 3400 units, while eagerly purchased and successfully raced by the small number of people in that orbit, was not economically viable. By 1958 that production had nearly tripled, and I will guarantee you that it was not because another 7,000 sports car racers in California traded in their Jaguars and such.
The Corvette would never have been around so long if it had not been bought in large proportion by average people who wanted something fun, fast and cool – kind of like the one they saw Martin Milner driving every week in Route 66.
It seems you missed my point. To make a sports car truly desirable by the masses (or at least have that image of being so), it’s essential that it had the serious sporting/racing/performance chops to give that reputation credibility.
This is precisely why the ’53-’54 Corvette largely failed: it was essentially a boulevard cruiser, with its six and PG. It looked great, but it wasn’t seen to be a serious competitor on the tracks, hence the reputation it quickly earned.
ZAD knew this perfectly. He didn’t invest in the ’56 Corvette’s performance chops in order to sell more to actual racers; there’s no real market in that. It was all about creating an image of the Corvette, based on its superlative performance, on the track and on the road.
You think the Corvette’s sales would have grown so strongly starting in 1956 if that hadn’t happened? My point is that the ’53-’54 Corvette was exactly what you said: a sports car that the owner looked great in. But no more than that.
Starting in 1956, it was a sports car that the owner looked great in, but the masses also knew then that the Corvette was a genuine world-class performer, the fastest car in the world. Or at least a very seriously fast car, if the owner chose the base 210 hp V8 and PG.
This is what the Corvette’s reputation was built on. Lots of sports cars made their owner “look great”, but most of them would have been blown away by the ‘Vette. Let’s face it: this is what street cred and image are all about.
It’s the established performance/racing tradition and resulting credibility and image that still sells Porsche’s SUV’s as well as Ferraris’.
How would the Corvette’s sales have been in ’56-’62 if it kept having a six and PG? Or a lame, heavy, lethargic V8?
The ’56 Corvette and its superlative engine created a legend based on actual capabilities. It’s a legend that even carried it through its most painful malaise years, even when its actual performance was pathetic.
No one has ever established a successful and lasting sports car brand without genuine sports car performance and credibility. Ford sort-of tried with the ’55-’57 TBird, with the Holman-Moody race cars, but it was obvious that these were truly “specials” and not indicative of what an owner could readily do with their TBirds. Ford soon moved on to something more suitable for the TBird.
I don’t dispute at all that by 1956 the Corvette had become a bona fide sports car that could satisfy some really demanding customers who wanted to go racing. And I agree completely that the car would never have survived without those kinds of chops.
But the reverse can be true too – a purpose-built race car that caters to a really small audience was never going to survive (certainly not at Chevrolet) on a volume of 3500 cars annually. What made the Corvette amazing is that by 1956 it was set to nail both markets – racers and those into image. Satisfying the racers gave the car a performance image and it was the image buyers who made the venture profitable enough for the company to cater to the racers. That Chevrolet could maintain that balance as perfectly as it did speaks well of those in charge of the program.
My point had been that it took a couple of years for the public to catch on to what the racers had already figured out after 1955. The Corvette’s 1956 production numbers were no better than the 1954 results, but after another year or two, the car was a success in the showrooms as well as on the track.
The Thunderbird was, as you suggest, was all hat and no cattle on the track.
The Corvette’s 1956 production numbers were no better than the 1954 results,
Yes, but the 1955 production number was…700. The painful reality was that the ’54 never sold properly, and there were still many unsold ones in ’55, hence the very low ’55 number. You really need to spread the ’54’s numbers over both years.
The ’53-’55 Corvette was undeniably a dud, a disappointment, and came close to being cancelled. The ’56 saved its bacon.
As to the rest of your points, I largely agree, and of course that applies to all mass (or semi mass) production sports car makers. The market for pure racing cars was of course minute. And all the sports car makers cultivated their racing chops (on Sunday) in order to sell (on Monday).
The ’53-’55 Vette didn’t have those racing chops, at all. Hence it’s failure. If folks wanted a boulevard cruiser to look good in, the TBird was a much better choice. But then everyone knew instantly that a TBird driver didn’t take sporty driving seriously, unlike a ’56 and up Vette driver, whetehr it was true or not.
Which gets back to my point: image. That’s the key factor. And regardless of how slow or fast you drove, if you drove a Vette, your image gained from the Vette’s genuine reputation as a genuine sports car.
Jim, I saw and experienced this first hand. In my neighborhood in IC, there was an owner of a ’56 Tbird (quite young, actually) and another that owned a ’59 Corvette. The difference in the cars’ and the owner/drivers’ image was…palpable. That was a reflection of the actual cars. Everyone knew the Vette was a truly capable sports car, and that the TBird was a very nice looking boulevard cruiser. And that’s precisely the image both of these guys were cultivating.
Admittedly over time, the Corvette’s hard core image began to soften. By the mid-late 60s, it was still a credible “sports car”, but it was not a successful sports car racer anymore. And its growing sales numbers were also diluting that image. But things were a bit different in the late 50s and early 60s.
I wonder if the initial Corvette was really a low-volume production response to all the show cars GM had put out in the early ‘50s. Actually build one that a customer could buy, to keep things spicy. On paper, the Blue Flame Six and PG would be “good enough”, as the performance numbers were not that bad, no matter what ordinary production car one matched it up against. But the “own a show car” market was actually tiny, as was the race car market. To top it off, while the race car things rubbed off positively on the brand, perhaps the “own your own show car” thing worked the other way. Actually dealing with the compromises of the “show” car in your driveway was no way to burnish the brand, and served more to take the air out of future show car receptions than actually doing any good.
This is all pure speculation on my part, but I have trouble understanding the reason to produce the first Corvette, other than for the exercise of actually having done it. What did it really add to the Chevy line-up, and how much additional showroom traffic (the kind that sold additional cars, not the teenaged boys just looking for a sales brochure) did the car actually produce?
One more point: the ’53-’54 Corvette was very much in the mold of the Kaiser Darrin and Nash-Healey. And they all enjoyed a somewhat similar degree of (non) success.
The new SBC was the magic ingredient that had been missing, along with a few other HD brake and suspension parts.
There were 3460 ’56s sold, almost exactly the same as in ’54. That jumped to 6339 in ’57, and then kept climbing.
It’s almost impossible to tell a ’56 from a ’57, unless it has a sign on it at a car show or such.
The ‘57s offered the close ratio four speed transmission, which was the last major piece to the high-performance puzzle. Both overall sales and Corvette sports car racing participation “broke out” to the upside in the ‘57 model year. Causation? Correlation? Or maybe the result of a fruitful stretch of tinkering with the Corvette formula for a few years.
I wonder if anyone in 1956 had any idea that the Corvette would still be produced (and would still be a credible sports car) over two decades into the 21st Century.
Perhaps the more salient question would have been: Did anyone in 1956 have any idea that it would be two decades into the 21st century before it got a mid engine? 🙂
I don’t think mid-engined sports cars were on too many buyers’ minds in 1956. The Lotus 19 didn’t arrive until 1960. The Lamborghini Muira was still a decade in the future.
I forgot about the Porsche 550. It was around in the mid-’50s. It seems like I’m not the only one to forget about it though. The 1964 Matra Djet is mentioned as the first mid-engine sports car in the Wikipedia article on the Lamborghini Muira. The Porsche 550 was street legal and reached limited production in 1953. The Porsche 904 went into production in 1963.
And I never got the hubbub over the midengined Corvette being some sort of missed opportunity until the C8 anyway, because it was such a blatantly unrealized bucket list fantasy idea of Zora’s that it just had to happen?
Ferrari went midengined with their V12 models in the 70s and 80s and back to front engine in the mid 90s to date, Mercedes only forays into mid engine sports cars was through concepts like the c111, Porsche stuck true their not-ideal rear engine layout in the 911, the Nissan GT-R is a revered performer with the front engine, as was the Lexus LFA, Aston Martins are all front engine, so where exactly was the Corvette up through the C7 falling behind the curve compared to the competition?
Sales wise the C8 has sold better than the outgoing C7 but not by much more than any of the other generations in the first few years of production. The thing’s riddled with hype, “not your father’s corvette” and based on my observations the same buyers who always drove Corvettes are driving the C8, not conquested hip McLaren buyers
I didn’t get the urgency of it either, but it was SUCH a common refrain, quite possibly from Arkus-Duntov and his successors feeding these various “scoops” on mid-engine Corvettes to the buff books to try to drum up enthusiasm.
I think you’re missing Paul’s point. From about 1970 until probably just before the debut of the C8, nearly every car magazine ran not just one or two but an assortment of semi-regular exposés on the Exciting New Mid-Engine Corvette in Your (Near) Future, to the point where in retrospect it seems like kind of a running gag.
True, I was so used to those leaked teases since I was a kid when the C8 was announced as being mid engined I rolled my eyes and exclaimed under my breath “yeah right”. The idea made much more sense in the 60s and 70s when powertrains were heavier(though I think the concurrent idea was wankel power of presumably even less weight), it’s just so weird that they ever fulfilled the dream with mid-engined fever largely a passed fad of the late 60s-80s, especially in light of the trajectory of the industry to EV, are they going to stick with its goofy(IMO of course) cab forward mid engined proportions even when there’s no engine to speak of for the C9 or 10 if/when that happens?
Kind of OT, but does anyone else have two copies of every picture? It’s been like that for a couple days now. (Android 13 and Chrome on a Pixel 6a)
Yes. And it’s a feature, not a bug. Two pictures for the price of one. 🙂
Then, on the seventh day, Carrol Shelby showed up with his Ford powered AC Cobras, and blew all Corvettes back to the 19th century 🙂
I imagine that one of the reasons that the C1 was much less expensive than its competition was because the engines and transmissions were basically just modified sedan and pickup parts that Chevrolet made by the millions. I wonder if the C8 shares much more than hardware and controls with anything else in the current Chevy lineup.
…and the profile of the Corvette owner – gold chains, loud of mouth, thick of neck, short of dick – would firmly establish itself over the coming decades…
just kidding…