The Grand Sports - Zora Duntov and Five Easy Corvettes... by VWLarry

By stevegolf
( 2 )

4 minute read

By VWLarry


In the 1970 movie, “Five Easy Pieces”, Jack Nicholson plays a brilliant concert pianist from a family of famous musicians, struggling with his feelings of rebelliousness against a stifling, patriarchal family of musicians. The 5 machines that Zora Arkus Duntov created form a tangible reference point to the movie’s “5 easy pieces” of classical music that formed its cornerstone of symbolism. Duntov was a rebel amongst GM’s corporate world of conformists, and the Corvette Grand Sports are testimony to this.



For their first several years, Corvettes were increasingly powerful and speedy, but they suffered from a bruised image of being uncompetitive with the hordes of European sports and GT cars that crowded the marketplace, and thrived on their records of accomplishments on the world’s racetracks. In a word, Corvettes appeared musclebound, in contrast to the sleek athleticism of the competition. GM’s “14th Floor” brasshats forbade company sponsored racing, in obedience to the AMA’s ban on participation by American carmakers.


Nice car, but up against the competition from say, Jaguar or Mercedes Benz or even Porsche, the Corvette just didn't have the same...gravitas as a high-performance automobile:



Duntov, presiding over Chevrolet’s somewhat schizophrenic program of sportscar development, wanted to take the Corvette to the battles, so to speak, and prove that this lone American sporting machine could compete, and win, against the world’s best. When the radically new Corvette Stingray was being developed in the early 1960s, he received approval from Ed Cole, Chevrolet’s boss, and a great engineer himself, to turn this new and very sophisticated Corvette into a world-beater, or at least a Ford/Shelby Cobra beater, which was the one car that was kicking sand all over the Corvette’s lunch during those years. Chevy people HATED this, and yearned for a Cobra killer. Duntov knew exactly how to build one.



He took the 3,100-pound stock Stingray, and remade it from fiberglass so thin it was translucent. The tubular chassis underneath, and many other components were aluminum. Everything that could be made lighter was. The final weigh-in saw the Grand Sport tip-toe the scales at 1,900 pounds. The standard car’s drum brakes were replaced with big discs all-around. But the heart of the GS was the killer, exotic 377 cubic inch V8 with four Weber carburetors that developed almost 500 horsepower.


Photos of the Grand Sport engine are hard to find, but this scale model of one displays the massive induction system that made the SBC "breathe":



Then, the 14th Floor big bosses called and cancelled the whole program. Instead of 125 Grand Sports to be sold to private racers in order to homologate the type, there were just 5 cars. The GM brasshats wanted those destroyed too, as if to destroy any evidence that the company had red blood flowing through its veins. But Duntov, with the help of Bunkie Knudsen, Cole’s replacement at Chevrolet Division, defied his bosses, and succeeded in preserving the 5 GS cars, and even got them out into the racing world, driven by now-legends like Roger Penske, Jim Hall, and Augie Pabst. They whipped the Cobras at their own game, and proved their point. Today they’re treasured icons; nearly priceless. They are symbols of a rebellious spirit embedded within a world of conformity.