Background
It’s sometimes fun to liken actors to cars. For instance, Hugh Grant could very easily be an E Type Jag, whereas Ray Winston is more of a Sierra Cosworth. The C3 Corvette is Burt Reynolds all day long (although strangely we don’t think he ever actually drove one on screen). But the Corvette wasn’t always a hairy chested macho sports car, and actually started life as more of a country club cruiser.
Back in the 1950s Chevy’s sales were in the doldrums and brand manager Thomas Keating’s solution was to commission a sports car to boost the marque’s image. Project Opel, as it was code named, used a glassfibre body allied to a 3.9-litre straight six engine and a two speed (count them) automatic transmission.
After debuting at New York’s 1953 Motorama show, just 300 1953 model cars were built – hardly a runaway success story. Not only that, they only managed to sell 183 of them. The following year’s facelifted model managed more than 3500 sales, but Chevy’s plant was geared to produce 10,000 a year.
The following year GM made the change the car needed, and dropped in a 4.3-litre V8 engine, at which point public interest in the Corvette took off, while the restyled 1956 models, with their deeply scalloped sides really set enthusiasts’ tongues wagging.
By 1968 the Corvette was firmly acknowledged as America’s sports car, and the C3’s arrival in that year just cemented it as a performance icon. The small block V8 grew to 5.7 litres and was by now producing up to 370 horsepower.
In its 14-year production run the C3 provided transport for Apollo 12 and 15’s pilots, introduced the world to the ZR-1 nameplate, and acted as pace car for the 1978 Indianapolis 500.
The third generation of America’s sports car also adopted transverse leaf spring independent rear suspension for the first time, a configuration that stayed until the C7 was discontinued in 2019.
Stylistically, the new car was an amalgamation of three previous Larry Shinoda concepts – 1962’s Corvair-powered Astro I, the mid-engined XP-819 of 1964, and the 1965 Mako Shark II, the latter of which made GM’s plans for the new Corvette abundantly clear.
The C3 kept the Corvette alive as muscle cars were gradually legislated out of existence; by 1974, the last big-block cars had left options lists.
1978 saw the last major C3 facelift – a bigger rear window – become available; four years later, it was all over, with the last Collector Edition cars offering fuel-injection and a hinged rear glass tailgate to tide enthusiasts over until the all-new C4 was ready in 1984.
