The 'VETTING PROCESS'

THIS GORGEOUS '58 CORVETTE HIDES HUGE PRO TOURING SMARTS, INCLUDING LATE-MODEL SUSPENSION, BIG BRAKES, AND A 535HP GEN V V8

- IAIN KELLY

WE ALL love classic cars for different reasons, and while some like to walk on the wild side with massive tubs, skyscraping blowers and reflectors having ride height, others prefer a more subtle approach.

Wendy Stevenson’s ’58 Corvette appears at a quick glance like a beautifully restored stocker, but when you dive deeper, you see the huge amount of work that Sydney’s FUEL Bespoke Design (FBD) has put into hiding the many clever modifications made to America’s Sports Car.

John Ward, the man behind FBD, has serious form in taking super-sad C1 Corvettes and turning them into cleverly disguised resto-mods. “I try to keep the essence of the design but just tweak around the edges,” he says.

For this particular project, John was given an incomplete base ’58 that Wendy and her husband Robert had bought out of Orange, following a chance discovery on Facebook Marketplace. It wasn’t ready for a scuff and squirt, though; John had to redo the sills, dash, transmission tunnel and all the hanging panels before he got to the fun stuff like shaving the fuel filler and widening the rear quarters to squeeze in fatter rubber.

“Bodywork was the biggest challenge, being a 60-year-old fibreglass body that’d had a tough life,” sighs John. “We had the choice of getting a better car, but Wendy and Robert had already bought this car, even though it was in terrible shape with damage and poor repairs. The complete front clip was replaced with new press-moulded pieces from Corvette Image in the USA.”

While the body took a stack of work to get up to scratch, John was more fortunate with the condition of the chassis. However, he wanted the C1 to ride and handle far better than the soft boulevard cruiser Chevy originally delivered.