Before the Second Generation Corvairs appeared, the big name Italian coach building houses had shown an interest in the car. Pininfarina showed a Coupe Speciale in 1960 (shown below) and also a 1962 variant with a taller nose and elongated roof (the green car). For the 1963 show season, GM design veep Bill Mitchell sent two chassis to Italy in a sort of design competition to see who could design a compelling sports coupe to be marketed in Europe, where the Corvair was viewed as a fairly large car. The red car shown below was Pininfarina's 1963 version; it seems clear that the PF design staff, still led by Tom Tjaarda, was focused on the fairly conservative clientele who bought Lancias and mid-range Benzes. It predicted the proportions, but not the form, of later production models...
But things got a little more exciting when Bertone showed Georgetto Giugiaro's interpretation in March 1963 at the Geneva show. The car featured a strong horizontal line echoing the original Corvair's bright trim surround, but here it's repositioned as a sharp crease just above the wheel centers, connecting the front and rear bumpers, which are shaped, along with the glazing of the cockpit canopy and rear hatch, to emphasize the curved plan and section of the car. The car's name, Testudo (turtle in Italian) is a reference to this sharp division between the upper and lower shell.
Here's a shot of Nuccio Bertone with the Testudo's canopy raised. No photos seem available of the great man (or anyone, for that matter) attempting to enter this car. But it seems intriguing that when asked to redesign the Corvair, young geniuses at Bertone as well as the GM Technical Center seem to have said, "This thing is just too easy to get into; let's make it a big production." In their design for the Monza GT show car shown below, Larry Shinoda (see '59 Sting Ray racer and '63 production car) and Tony Lapine (known for his later work at Porsche, like the 928) adopted the same canopy approach, though they sensibly lowered the sill, because the GT measured only 42 inches from road to rooftop. More intriguingly, they moved the engine ahead of the transmission for a true mid-engine layout, shortened the wheelbase 16 inches to a tidy 92, and planted a disc brake at each wheel. The seats were fixed in a semi-reclining position, but the pedals and steering wheel were adjustable. That feature eventually showed up 9 years later on the Maserati Bora, a car drawn by Giugiaro. Several sources claim that the GM team was inspired by his Testudo, which seems odd because the Monza GT appeared around 9 months earlier, at the Road America race track in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin in summer of '62. To lots of gear heads, including this writer, it immediately made everything else look quaintly obsolete...
For once, the American team had stepped out smartly ahead of the Europeans, producing an uncompromising, focused machine with convincing thematic unity reflected in every detail. Unswerving devotion to the theme shows in the crease which divides the windshield and carries the ridge from the pointed nose over the roof, and also in somewhat impractical details like the clamshell headlight doors and the jet fighter-derived entry canopy. The proportions were as right as the packaging. Unlike the Testudo, which has the long hood / short deck proportions of a front-engined car (only the small vents below the backlight hint at the rear engine location), the Monza GT declared its engine position (note the vents forward of the wheels) just as mid-engined cars had completed their takeover of Formula 1 racing and were about to challenge the old guard at Indy.
At the rear, the dished and recessed panel containing lights and license forecast the design of the '65 Corvair, while the gutsy use of louvers instead of sloping glass (the actual window was nearly vertical) would show up over 4 years later sheltering a transverse V12 on Lamborghini's mid-engined Miura. But at this moment in the summer of 1962, kids of all ages who saw the Monza GT wanted one immediately...
There was also a Monza SS Spyder (foreground) with the engine behind the transmission in the usual (for Corvairs anyway) location. This was on an 88 inch wheelbase. But the one we hoped they'd build for customers was the mid-engined GT coupe. What we got instead in autumn of 1964, when the Second Generation Corvair showed up in showrooms, was a remarkably clean, well-proportioned form with slim roof pillars and a peaked, forward slanting nose faintly echoing that GT show car. The signature horizontal lip had become a crease, and slipped down to a position it would occupy on future BMWs. Under the skin, a fully independent suspension modeled on the Corvette replaced the swing-axle rear suspension of the earlier Corvairs. A turbocharged engine, introduced midway through the first generation cars, was available on Corsa models. It now made 180 hp. Finned aluminum brake drums were an option; disc brakes showed up in the Chevy line for the first time in '65, but only on the Corvette. There was plenty to love about this car, and automotive journalists as well as the general public took to it. In this, the first full year of competition from Ford's Mustang, Chevy still sold around 235,000 Corvairs. The car had a whole year to pick up momentum before Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed was published on November 30, 1965...
In the news stories related to the book, mainstream journalists failed to report what automotive writers had noted often: Swing axle rear suspensions were a feature of many vehicles, including all Mercedes Benz passenger cars, and were combined with rear engine location on VWs, Porsches, Fiats, Renaults and Simcas as well as the 1960-64 Corvairs. In any case, Chrevrolet had added a camber compensator in late 1963 and switched to a state of the art fully independent system a year before the book appeared. A 1972 Texas A & M University study commissioned by the NHTSA found that the 1960-63 Corvair had no greater propensity for loss of control in transitional response under extreme conditions than its competitors, but Corvairs were off the market by then. Partly due to the negative publicity, for the 1966 model year Chevy sold only around 103,000 Corvairs. But damage was also done by GM's introduction of the Camaro and Firebird, which were aimed at the Mustang but also siphoned off Corvair sales. In the final year, 1969, about 6,000 Corvairs found homes. The people who drove them home were probably not aware that the last cars were largely hand-built, in a dedicated Corvair Room, by the last loyalists to the air-cooled cause at Chevrolet.
Photo credits:
Top 3 photos: Pininfarina S.p.A.
4th & 5th from top: Gruppo Bertone
6th, 7th & 8th from top: Monza GT & Monza SS Spyder: Chevrolet Division of General Motors
Bottom photo: 1965 Corvair Corsa coupe, joescorvairgarage.com
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