2020 Chevrolet C8 Corvette

At long last

- Robert Cumberford

1 Front 3/4 View

So it’s here, at last, the long-awaited mid-engine Corvette. It wasn’t easy. The time-honored phrase “a day late and a dollar short” has almost always applied to the Chevrolet Corvette. Delay has been measured in years, not days, and the funding shortfall in tens of millions of dollars, but the result is the same. The C1 Corvette platform lasted through 10 years and three face-lifts instead of the planned four-year run. The “split-window” C2 came a decade after initial production but was itself a full five years late. I was working hard in 1955 on a C2 planned for 1958. Its advanced rear-gearbox chassis finally achieved production only with the 1997 C5. That layout did reach production in 1977—outside General Motors—with the Porsche 928, created in part by Anatole Lapine, who’d worked with me on the stillborn ’50s C2. I know little about behind-the-scenes projects that might have occurred during the 40 years between my departure from GM in 1957 and the arrival of the C5, but I suspect there were a lot of exciting and highly feasible— but not fundable—projects. I do know that Zora Arkus-Duntov advocated for mid-engine Corvettes at least 60 years ago and that he built a mid-engine CERV research single-seater in the ’50s with its small-block V-8 behind the driver. So this car has come to the market extremely late.