The Italian Jobs Part 4: Saved From the Crusher

The car pictured below is yet another Corvette (sort of) in our series of Corvettes bodied in Europe, and joins the Kelly Corvette in our pantheon of annoyingly desirable Chevies.  But it was denied Corvette status for awhile owing to the fact that it's kind of un-Corvettelike in some departments like the body (built of steel by Pininfarina in Italy) and engine type (it's a two-rotor Wankel built under NSU patents by GM) as well as engine placement (close to the middle of the chassis).  Oh, and the whole assemblage is built on a Porsche chassis; almost forgot to mention that…

Anyway, in a spasm of Revisionist History at GM about a a third of a century ago, it was decided that XP-897GT was an inconvenient reminder of GM's expensive experiment with rotary engines just before the first fuel crisis, and should be sent to the crusher.  Fortunately, a future Jaguar design chief named Geoff Lawson was working at GM's Bedford Truck Division in Luton, England when the order came through to crush a steel-bodied Corvette. He called his friend, automotive historian Tom Falconer, who was able to arrange a meeting in Detroit with Chuck Jordan, then the GM styling chief and someone Falconer had previously encountered during a book project.  And so the unique Corvette two-rotor was spared from the crusher…

The car had been produced in a 6-month crash program to demonstrate GM's new rotary engine concept, and the engine was transversely mounted ahead of the rear wheels, and driving them through a prototype automatic transmission being developed for the forthcoming X-body cars like the (pretty forgettable) Chevy Citation.  Owing to the short development time, GM decided to build the car on a modified Porsche 914-6 chassis, which offered a couple of advantages beyond saving time, like sturdiness and great brakes.  Pininfarina, which had been trying for years to get more special projects from GM, built the body.  The car was finished in April 1972 and displayed at car shows the next year.  Like the Avanti featured in an earlier post, the XP-897 probably owes a lot of its visual freshness to the collapsed schedule.  The overall forms are clean, spare, easy to read, and mostly reinforced by unfussy attention to detail.  Tom Falconer still has the car, has repainted it in its original shade of red, and replaced the unobtainable GM two-rotor engine with a Mazda 13B rotary driving through a Cadillac transmission.  Corvette enthusiasts voyaging to the Mother Country still knock on his door to see it...

And XP-897 had offspring of a sort.  Apparently GM's Opel Division in Germany was two years late in getting the memo about abandoning the rotary engine, and designed its own mid-engine GT-W around a rotary (the "W" is for Wankel).  After rotary engine development was halted, the Wankel was replaced by a 6 liter V8.  Also called the Geneve (it was displayed at Geneva), the Opel GT-W features concealed headlights, eliminating the one distracting feature on XP-897 (those deep light tunnels) and deftly integrates the gill-like vents for the front-mounted radiator with a tidy attempt at a 5 mph bumper (remember, it's 1975).  Not sure if Pininfarina built this one, but there are clear references to other Italian designs, like the dropped window sill and belt line crease echoing Giugiaro's seminal Mangusta of nearly a decade earlier.  At the rear, the Geneve was even cleaner than XP-897; it seems like nothing could be subtracted or should be added…

If there's a lesson in Geoff Lawson's refusal to crush XP-897, or in Opel's not noticing (or pretending not to notice) that their Wankel car project had been cancelled, it may be that it's a good idea to cheerfully ignore stupid orders.  History may thank you someday...

Photo credits:

Top:  General Motors

2nd:  General Motors, reprinted in corvettes.nl

3rd:  General Motors

4th:  General Motors