This is the first in a series on cars most people have never heard about: Chevrolet Corvettes that were bodied in Europe (mostly Italy). These cars, a tiny minority of the nearly 1.6 million Corvettes produced from the first year (1953, when Chevy managed to sell only 300) through 2015, are a subset of yet another exclusive category…that being Corvettes with metal bodies. Our first example was actually built in Switzerland by Ghia Aigle, an offshoot of the better-known Torinese Ghia. For a good while before WWII and afterwards as well, Switzerland offered duty-free imports of foreign chassis as long as they were bodied by a Swiss coach builder. The subject car is a rebodied '54 Corvette, meaning it has the unloved Blue Flame Six under that scooped and streaked hood, and was featured as shown (hmm, salmon pink with gray accents and orange interior) at the 1957 Geneva show. Giovanni Michelotti gets most of the credit (and blame, too) for the design. One can only dimly imagine the design brief, maybe something along the lines of, "My wife doesn't know that I blew our new car budget on a used Corvette, so please disguise it as a '56 Plymouth Savoy business coupe…"
Later on, this alloy-bodied car was updated (by Michelotti again) with radiused rear wheel cutouts and a "fin delete" package. With the added vent panes and reworked metal in the front fenders it almost seems a different car, but the records say there's only one. It looks better in silver gray (a bit like a giant Triumph Italia, no coincidence), but apparently the remodel did not extend to plunking a small block Chevy V8 in place of the anemic Blue Flame...
Lack of power is not a problem with our next examples. These are the three 1959 Corvettes bodied at the request of Texas racers by Scaglietti, the same outfit that built many of the legendary Ferrari road racing cars in the 50s and 60s. Gary Laughlin, Jim Hall (later of Chaparral fame) and Carroll Shelby wanted something lighter than a stock Corvette, but with the Chevy's cheap, reliable power. As the resulting alloy-bodied cars were to be raced against Ferraris (see last photo) in the SCCA, Old Man Ferrari made his unhappiness known to Scaglietti, and the cars took over 2 years to deliver. When you compare them with the Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France in the last photo, you'll see that none of the draftsmen at Scaglietti had to put in much overtime scheming up new ideas. They are pretty, though…And one happy aspect of the Italians pulling the plug on this operation is that it may have led, however indirectly, to Shelby shoehorning a Ford V8 into the lovely lightweight AC Ace roadster to make the Cobra.
Photo credits from top:
Top & 2nd: corvettes.nl
3rd: corvetteblogger.com
4th & 6th: conceptcarz.com
5th: petersen.org
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