mod@tech

After the pops of the flashbulbs and after the gathered Chevrolet workers and managers returned to their stations on the hastily thrown together assembly line in a General Motors garage in Flint, Michigan, the very first production Corvette rolled out of the garage and into mystery. Some claimed it was destroyed, the natural aftermath of torture testing at the hands of GM engineers. Others believed it could have been restyled as a Motorama show car. But, as early Corvette restorer and researcher Corey Petersen claims to have proved, that VIN #001 car still exists and has made its way to his Utah garage in preparation for full documentation and restoration.

“I’ve been sniffing around for it for 15 to 20 years,” Petersen said. “It’s been a fun chase.”

In fact, Petersen said it wasn’t his intention to find, let alone buy, the car all along. Instead, he and fellow Corvette researcher John Amgwert simply set out to document the three pre-production Corvette prototypes and the first dozen or so Corvettes that Chevrolet built on the Flint assembly line. Every 1953 Corvette came equipped in the same configuration – six-cylinder engine, Powerglide automatic transmission, Polo White paint, Sportsman Red interior, and whitewall tires – but as with many other cars, the earliest production versions of the Corvette had minute differences from the rest, and Petersen and Amgwert wanted to know exactly how the Flint-built cars differed from the rest of the 1953 production cars built in St. Louis.

As Karl Ludvigsen wrote in “Corvette: America’s Star-Spangled Sports Car, 1953-1982,” Ed Cole and his staff at Chevrolet were under a tight deadline. Harlow Curtice, then the president of GM, wanted the Corvette in production in June of 1953, just a year after it was approved for production. That meant a number of changes had to be made on the fly, including the decision to build the production cars out of fiberglass rather than steel and the conversion of the garage located on Van Slyke Road in southwest Flint previously used for Chevrolet customer deliveries into an assembly line while the St. Louis plant was being readied for production.

While production did indeed commence on June 30, 1953, the rush to get underway meant the earliest cars differed from the later cars in a number of subtle ways. Most people point to the wheel covers – domed to begin with, but eventually replaced with the more recognizable knockoff style – and Petersen already knew of other differences like a change in the convertible top design and the switch from foot-operated to vacuum-operated windshield washers. “Some changes were made late in 1953, others in ’54, and that was largely due to the inventory stock,” he said. “They didn’t want to throw away what they had, so they used up the ’53 stuff until it was gone.”

Follow the Research

He’d also known that the first three cars off the assembly line that June 30 didn’t go directly to customers. In fact, of the first nine cars off the assembly line, only three left GM, and those three – serial numbers 004, 005, and 006 – went to members of the Du Pont family or to executives in the Du Pont organization. The rest all went out for further evaluation to GM or Chevrolet engineering departments. Petersen figured the work orders produced by the cars’ time in those engineering departments should shed some light on his research, so he started to collect all of the relevant work orders he could from GM’s Heritage Center. Fortunately, Petersen said, Jim Perkins had Art Armstrong gather as much Corvette documentation from throughout the company as possible “just to get the Corvette community off his back,” otherwise many of those materials would have remained inaccessible or lost.

While it had long been presumed that the first two production-line cars had been destroyed after their times in the engineering departments, Petersen discovered different fates for them in some work orders he only obtained a couple months ago. The second production car received a designation of 3951 and was ultimately used to test the viability of installing a V-8 engine instead of the Blue Flame six-cylinder engine. The first, VIN 001 received a designation of 3950 and set aside for a few different uses. It served as the go-to car for various GM executives who wanted to experience the new Corvette sports car; it was on hand when GM announced the 1954 Corvettes at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia; and most significantly, Chevrolet let a whole battalion of GM engineers pick it apart to look for various deficiencies that had made it through the rushed development and production process.

In total, those engineers found 22 items to fix on 3950, according to the work orders that Petersen dug up. Those items ranged from minor rattles and adjustments to design improvements that Chevrolet would go on to implement on later production cars. Among the latter, three in particular stood out to Petersen: an order to make more room between the seat and the steering wheel by both lowering the seat 1-1/4 inches and by raising the steering column, an order to revise the fuel filler box and its hinge for better body clearance, and an order to cover the exposed rivets seen in the recessed license plate box.

Those three in particular stood out to him because he’d seen all three on a 1953 Corvette once before, and he knew exactly where that car rested.

Forgotten and Pushed Aside

Exactly where 3950, the first production Corvette, went after it left GM remains a mystery. According to the paperwork Petersen rounded up, the MSO on the car was not triggered by a dealer, as would be expected for a production car, but by the manufacturer, Chevrolet. As Petersen pointed out, GM employees had purchased other early Corvettes after their times with the engineering departments (VIN 002 went to Russ Sanders while VIN 008 went to designer Waino Hosko), so it’s likely another GM employee managed to buy VIN 001.

Rumors within the Corvette community had the car in the Cincinnati area sometime in the Seventies, but not even the most ardent of Corvette historians were able to gain an audience with the family that supposedly owned it.

Still, 1953 Corvettes are few and far between and thus generally well known to Corvette enthusiasts. Amgwert, along with other founders of the National Corvette Restorers Society, had already tracked down VIN 003 and sent it to Lloyd Miller’s shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a full restoration. That restoration, in turn, led another 1953 Corvette owner to send his car to Miller’s shop. That car, however, came with a number of oddities that nobody could explain at the time, and the East Coast-based owner had made some noise about the car possibly being VIN 002, which drew Petersen’s attention.

He and Amgwert examined the car after it arrived in Miller’s shop, about 20 years ago, and couldn’t reconcile what they saw with any production 1953 Corvette. The floor under the driver’s seat had been cut out and lowered. The firewall had been notched at the steering column. It had the 1954-style fuel filler box and hinge. Woven fiberglass cloth covered what remained of the rivets they expected to find in the license plate box. Because those alterations didn’t make any sense at the time, Petersen figured the car was an anomaly, likely a later production car, and nearly forgot about it. Miller and the owner of the car nearly forgot about it too; shortly after the restoration began, the owner turned his attention to health issues within the family and de-prioritized the Corvette’s restoration. Miller pushed it to the back of his shop and the two lost touch.

The Corvette’s History Uncovered

With the work orders seemingly confirming that the car in Miller’s shop was 3950 all along, however, Petersen arranged for another viewing, during which he re-examined the lowered seat, the firewall notch, and the fuel filler box. He found a few other oddities undocumented in the work orders as well, including fabricated plugs in place of the exhaust openings in the tail panel. Unfortunately, because the car had been stripped of many of its parts and sat without a drivetrain for many years, he couldn’t confirm many of the other work orders that, for example, called for a bronze gear on the distributor drive or a revised tachometer cable.

He reached out to the owner, initially just to help “get the car moving along,” Petersen said. “The car deserves to be finished up, so let’s get to work on it and see if we can prove what it is.” His conversations with the owner eventually turned to buying the car and, with a title in hand, he retrieved the Corvette earlier this month.

With another 1953 Corvette restoration (VIN 087) under way and the Utah snow making it difficult to jockey cars around, Petersen said he hasn’t been able to more fully examine the car since bringing it home or even to lift the body off the frame to find the VIN stamped on the latter. However, while emptying out the parts stuffed in the Corvette’s trunk, he happened to look under one of the flaps on the bottom of one of the cardboard boxes and found a door jamb VIN plate with a serial number ending in 001. He also put together a presentation on the car for his local NCRS chapter, which has since been uploaded to YouTube.

Petersen’s plans call for a full restoration. “The car is plain and simply not for sale,” he said. “I think I’ve got one more restoration left in me, and I think I already have everything that I need to complete the reassembly and restoration. Restoring a car such as this, you have to think through what point in time you are going back to. Are you going to include all of the engineering changes? I think you have to. That’s one issue that has to be resolved before the restoration can be done.”

Is It the Oldest Corvette?

Should Petersen’s continuing research on the car absolutely verify the car’s status as the first production Corvette, it may also prove the car to be the oldest Corvette known to exist.

According to Amgwert’s research, Chevrolet assigned five engineering car numbers – 852, 853, 854, 855, and 856 – for the development of full-size operational pre-production Corvette prototypes but ultimately used just three. Car number 852 became EX-52, distinguished by tiny scoops on the tops of the front fenders, which went on to become the Motorama car shown to the public at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. Car number 853 became EX-53, another Motorama car that primarily toured Canada. Car 856 went on to be used at the GM Proving Grounds.

EX-52, after its Motorama tour, was ordered to be stripped of its body, which was then sent out for a burn test. The chassis, meanwhile, went on to be stretched and placed under the Corvette Nomad concept car, which Corvette historians believe no longer exists.

Work orders directed EX-53’s body to be placed on 856’s chassis. The latter, after its time at the proving grounds, started to look shabby, and GM executives wanted it to look nicer for visiting dignitaries. The chassis of EX-53 and the body of 856 were ordered to be crushed, and neither the body of EX-53 or the chassis of 856 have surfaced in the years since. “This is still an ongoing research project,” Petersen said.

As for the naysayers who doubt Petersen’s research and claims about any of the pre-production or early production Corvettes, Petersen said he hopes that by bringing this particular car to light, it’ll spur others to offer further evidence for examination. “I get that this is a controversial subject,” he said. “But I welcome other points of view with documentation to back it up.”

He said he expects the restoration of the car to take four or five years.

Date: November 1959

Location: Perth, Western Australia

Source: via State Library of Western Australia

What do you see here?

The Dodge Charger Daytona SRT EV concept car raised eyebrows when it was released to the public last year, mostly due to its imitation exhaust system dubbed the “Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust.” Typically, an exhaust doesn’t belong on a fully electric car, but Dodge decided they weren’t ready to lose the deep burbling sound that, supposedly, only a naturally aspirated V-8 can make.

The Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust system on the Daytona SRT EV can reach up to 126 decibels, the same as a Hellcat powered Dodge, by pushing air through a chambered speaker box and down the pipes, exiting via the exhaust outlet. Dodge wasn’t done tuning the sound upon the system’s first release, but it was certainly a conversation starter.

The latest version of the Fratzonic system was presented at the Chicago Auto Show’s Concept & Technology Garage. The sound still doesn’t completely encompass that of a true V-8, but the rumble and bass tone was definitely adjusted to be deeper and less electronic. But that’s just our opinion, what do you think? Take a listen and then comment below.

SRT Charger Dodge Electric Performance Muscle Coupe Daytona Concept

youtu.be

The final day of Sick Week 2023 saw many battles for position come down to the final laps in Orlando. After hundreds of miles and nearly a hundred racers out of the fray, it was time for racers to put the wild tunes in and shoot for the moon. Showing restraint was no longer an option. And there were way too many battles that needed to be settled before the day was done and awards handed out.

With Tom Bailey having bowed out after Bradenton, Unlimited was a contest between Michael Westberg and Stefan Gustafsson. Both Swedes had been battling each other to within tenths of each other’s time slips. But it was the Corvette’s nasty wheel-hopping tendencies that allowed Westberg’s 6.435- second pass at 216 MPH to shut the door for good. Westberg’s 6.46 average trumped Gustafson’s second-place 6.59 average. But the victory was a touch bittersweet, as the S-10 had turned it’s last lap in anger. The rolling chassis had already been sold and the powertrain is moving on to Westberg’s next project.

In Unlimited Iron, Alex Taylor persevered throughout all of her doubts to clip four six-second laps. Day five wouldn’t see a full week with a six-second pass per track, but the 7.08 pass was close enough to be good. Tina Pierce would take second with her 1966 Nova, while Robert Bartram’s Mercury Cougar would collect third place.

Tina Pierce took home the #2 spot behind Alex Taylor In the Unlimited Iron class. Sick Week 2023 marked her third event with the Chevy II.Cole Reynolds

Brett LaSala’s “Snot Rocket 2.0” Mustang was a dominant force in Modified, also staying in the six-second average range. Pro Street saw Clark Rosenstengel wound up the victim of an upset when his driveline forced him into a 12.52-second final pass, which allowed Clint Sodowsky to earn the title with a 7.69 average. Super Street’s battle between Eric Yost, Bradley Arnold, and Andrew Dopita boiled down to a distance of eight hundredths between first-place Yost and third-place Dopita.

Stick Shift was Richard Guido’s class to lose, and his 8.84 average clenched it while Zackary Wicks took the Quickest Non-V8 Stick award with his 1997 Jeep TJ. “Doc” McEntire and his “See Red” Camaro sewed up Naturally Aspirated with seven-second laps every day. Rowdy Radial saw Jordan Tuck use Devin Vanderhoof’s Mustang as it was intended, averaging a 4.64 average in the 1/8th mile. In Street Freaks, Tony Niemczyk’s 1995 Eclipse claimed a second title and Quickest Four-Cylinder. Ben “Mechanical Stig” Neal took Quickest Six-Cylinder with his Barra-motivated 1987 Toyota Cresta, while Jessie Harris claimed Quickest Diesel with his Chevrolet C10.

Larry West’s 1941 Willys won the crown in Hot Rod vs. Gassers vs. Beetles, with James Holth claiming the Beetle title with his Karmann Ghia and Robert Leavens taking the Gasser win with his 1965 Chevy II. Street Race 275 saw William Lujan and Jordan Boudreau separated by one-thousandth of a second before day five and at the end as well, with Lujan the victor. Sick Street Race was just as tight, with Aaron Shaffer just barely clenching the win over Dustin Trance.

Michael Westberg secured the overall and Unlimited class win at Sick Week 2023. The S-10 has been sold as a rolling chassis, but the engine combo will come out and go into a new car he is currently building.Cole Reynolds

Sick Week 2023 Winners:

• Unlimited: Michael Westberg, 1991 Chevrolet S-10, 6.4640@214.416
• Unlimited Iron: Alex Taylor, 1955 Chevrolet 210, 6.9866@206.946
• Modified: Brett LaSala, 2012 Ford Mustang, 6.7438@213.444
• Pro Street: Clark Rosenstengal, 2010 Chevrolet Camaro, 7.6976@183.796
• Super Street: Eric Yost, 1968 Chevrolet Camaro, 7.4614@186.822
• Stick Shift: Richard Guido, 1965 Pontiac GTO, 8.8452@160.488
• Naturally Aspirated: James “Doc” McEntire, 1968 Chevrolet Camaro, 7.8338@163.742
• Rowdy Radials (1/8th Mile): Jordan Tuck, 1993 Ford Mustang, 4.644@166.494
• Sick Week Freaks: Tony Niemczyk, 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse, 8.7606@154.892
• Hot Rods vs. Gassers vs. Beetles: Larry West, 1941 Willys, 10.0334@132.342
• Street Race 275: William Lujan, 1990 Ford Mustang, 8.5428@159.196
• Sick Street Race: Aaron Shaffer, 1998 Chevrolet Camaro SS, 8.5428@159.196
• Pro DYO: Nicholas Destine, 1983 Ford LTD. Fastest ET: 9.262 Slowest ET: 9.296 Spread: 0.034
• DYO: Wilfredo Blanco, 2016 Ford Mustang GT. Fastest ET: 10.540 Slowest ET 10.586 Spread: 0.046

Sick Week 2023 Full Gallery: Day Five

At one point, Roberto F. Neris lost track of how many Chevettes he owned.

“I had to go count them again,” he said. “Not too many people have so many cars they lose track of them.”

For the record, he has 27 Chevrolet Chevettes, Pontiac T-1000s, and even a couple rarities like a Pontiac Acadian and a Buick Opel by Isuzu. Or, at least, he does as of this writing. In the time it took to schedule and conduct an interview with him, he added at least a couple to the collection, and he’s always on the prowl for more. “Almost anything Chevette related, I grab it,” he said. While he said he knows of some Canadians who may have more Chevettes by headcount, those cars are largely parts cars. He, on the other hand, figures he might have the largest collection of running, driving, and insured GM T-cars in North America.

“It is an obsession,” he said.

Why Chevettes?

Exactly why would anybody collect so many examples of perhaps the cheapest car GM ever built, the one car that seems destined to never increase in cachet no matter how old, the car that even malaise car enthusiasts look down upon? “I’ve had guys look at my whole collection and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got a couple hundred dollars’ worth of cars there,'” Rob said.

He’ll laugh at the jokes, but his reasoning is just as earnest as any other collector’s: His first car was a five-year-old 1984 Chevette that his father bought him when he turned 16 and got his license. His father didn’t have a lot of money, he said, “but he got the best car he could get me.”

That car took Rob to school and to his jobs as a pizza delivery guy and at the counter of a Pep Boys. He learned to wrench on it, and fondly recalls swapping in a 2.8L V-6 over a weekend when the original 1.6L four-cylinder blew up so he’d have a ride to school on Monday. “It wasn’t perfect, but it ran and drove,” he said.

That first car also survived plenty of young Rob’s abuse. Only after seven accidents did he have to send it to the junkyard. “That last one, I hit a telephone pole, a fireplug, and then a 1980 Olds Cutlass, and it ripped the whole front end off the car,” he said. “But we were okay, and I started it up and drove it home.”

He admits the cars had their faults. They were never great on power. The ergonomics of that angled steering column and the minimal footwells were uncomfortable. The brakes had a tendency to overheat, boiling the fluid and leading to crashes such as the one that took his 1984 out of commission. But they still held a certain charm for him.

“They’re such basic, simple, honest cars,” he said. “They’re so easy to work on, you can fix about anything with pliers and a screwdriver. In the Chevette commercials they said it’d ‘drive you happy’ and that’s true. Every time I get in one, I feel like I’m 16 again.”

And, even with recent upticks in prices, Chevettes are still the cheapest way to get into a rear-wheel-drive GM car.

The Collection Begins

While Rob always had at least a couple on hand both before and after he crashed that first one, they were mainly parts cars that he could buy for $50 or $100 that he used to keep his daily drivers running. He kept them stashed at his parents’ house or in garages around Philadelphia until he eventually became a used car dealer and bought a 13,000-square-foot warehouse. But then in 2006 or 2007, he realized that the parts cars he was buying were so nice and original, he couldn’t bear to take them apart, so he started to keep them as-is and look for more in survivor condition.

“They’re still out there,” he said. “People called them throwaway cars, but there are people who like them. There was a sentimental value to them.”

For instance, one of his Chevettes came from a 90-year-old man who bought it as the last car he’d drive and treated it well. “He wanted it to go to a good home,” Rob said. “The cars are like puppies in that way – people want them to go to good homes.”

Rob promises exactly that. Not only does he refuse to cut up the cars he buys now or turn them into race cars, he said that even if he removes parts from the cars – for instance, to change out the wheels or to install more powerful engines – he’ll keep everything, down to the nuts and bolts, that he removes from the cars should he decide to return the car to its original specifications. “I don’t know if I’ll need it someday,” he said. “I don’t even throw emissions stuff out.”

While he said he searches online constantly for Chevettes and has started a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to the cars, he finds many of his cars via word of mouth. “People know to come to me when they see one for sale,” he said. He’s even started to become more selective regarding the ones he admits to the collection. He shies away from four-doors, for example, and he prefers the 1976 to 1979 models, with the 1983 and up models coming in second. “The ’80 to ’82s with those chrome bumpers I just don’t like.”

V-6s and Other Restomods

As noted before, he’s not averse to modifying the Chevettes in his collection, but only to a certain extent. He can admire, for instance, the Bad Seed – the Chevette that Steve Magnante built for Hot Rod magazine with a 500-cu.in. Cadillac V-8 stuffed into it – but “that’s too much cutting for me,” he said.

Instead, he likes to personalize the Chevettes in his collection. “That’s the whole reason I have so many, is that I can leave some original and I can have some that are a little different,” he said.

He’s done a number of engine swaps, mainly on his later Chevettes, including small-block Chevrolet V-8s, LS V-8s, and 4.3L V-6s, and he has an ongoing Quad4 swap project. He’s found faults with many of them: 4.3s are too heavy (“Might as well install a 350.”), LS engines don’t fit as well as earlier small-blocks, and small-blocks require upgraded rear axles. However, he said the ideal engine to swap into a Chevette for anybody looking for more than the stock 65 horsepower is the 3.4L V-6 out of the 1993 to 1995 Camaro. It’s lightweight – the complete drivetrain with a 2004R weighs about 35 pounds more than the stock engine and transmission – it’s fairly well supported by the aftermarket, and it’s relatively inexpensive and readily available.

That said, even in stock form, maybe with a non-computerized carburetor swapped in for the later computer-controlled carburetor and a good tune, Rob said the Chevette can be a lot of fun.

“On my commute to my shop, you can only do 40 to 45 miles per hour, and I can drive that flat out,” he said. “My son has one now, and we can race ours on the street and not get in trouble because nobody but you knows you’re racing.”

Growing the Collection

While some single-model or single-make collectors like to seek out rarities and oddities to add a little flavor to their collections, Rob said he’s more interested in preserving them as daily drivers. He has no interest at all, for example, in obtaining a Leata Cabalero, the Chevette-based neoclassic built in Post Falls, Idaho, and the only reason he recently picked up one of the Chevette-based Duchess kit cars made to resemble an MG TD is because it came unassembled for $500. The rarest cars in his collection, he said, are the 1976 Pontiac Acadian – the Canadian version of the Chevette that has become thin on the ground north of the border and that is vanishingly rare in the United States – and a T-1000 that he bought out of Oklahoma loaded with just about every option a T-body could come with, including aluminum wheels, power steering, power brakes, air conditioning, a tilt steering column, and a sunroof.

That said, he’s not averse to adding overseas variants of the T-car to the collection. He already has the aforementioned 1979 Buick Opel by Isuzu, a 46,000-mile garage-kept car with a plaid interior and period-correct Ansen slot mags, and he said he’d like to eventually import at least a couple of Brazilian Chevettes, including a station wagon and pickup variant. “The T-car was developed as a world car, but this is the only country in the world where they’re not adored,” he said. “In Brazil, they love them and make reproduction parts for them. It’s probably because other countries had sporty versions of the Chevette. The sportiest we got was the S, which wasn’t much, but I think if we’d have gotten one, things would have changed.”

That said, he does see mounting appreciation for the Chevette here in the States. As an example, Rob pointed to the 1977 COPO Chevette with less than 5,000 miles that sold at Mecum’s Chattanooga auction last October for $16,500 and that subsequently sold on Bring a Trailer for $21,000. “Not everybody can afford a Camaro or a Corvette,” he said. “With Chevettes, you can get a pristine car for $4,500 to $6,500, and you get a turnkey car you can go to shows with.”

As for their nerd car image, Rob said they’re still seen that way, “but things have changed. “A lotta people had bad feelings about the cars, but they’ve come around. They’ve begun to appreciate the cars because they lasted the test of time when others haven’t.”

Regardless of the cars’ rise in value, Rob said none of his are for sale nor will they ever be. Aside from continuing to add to the collection, he said he does plan on restoring a couple of the cars already in the collection. All of them, he said, will go to his two sons.

Or, at least that’s the plan. He’s already filled his warehouse with T-cars, Fieros, a few Eighties Fords, and the odd Astro or Vega. He may just have to buy another one to keep the collection going.

“All I know is that I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do,” he said.