During an avalanche of dire news broadcasts, one tends to seize on any bit of good news in a sometimes vain effort to keep a hopeful mood afloat. The author was cheered, for example, by the resurgence of the black-footed ferret, once thought extinct, with at least 300 specimens counted in the western US, though this may not make prairie dogs, their primary source of food, happy. A long heat wave ended with some desperately needed rainstorms here on the drought-stricken Front Range. And for the second time in as many weeks, we found this 1963 Corvette Sting Ray coupe being used as a daily driver in Boulder...
We've avoided showing the license number because it would be bad manners to expose the owner to endless requests to sell (or even paint) this Split Window, which appears to be in fine running condition, with good tires and a tidy interior. One thought that occurred while taking these shots is that while Corvettes are among the most-often stolen cars in the country, the paint condition on this one may be just as effective an anti-theft feature as an alarm. In an increasingly pretentious collector car market, where you see adds for things like "an important 1960 Pontiac station wagon" (well, it had been owned by a celebrity), it's enjoyable to see an old classic being used as a car. We especially liked the trailer hitch.
One feature shared by 1963-'67 Sting Ray coupes and convertibles, maybe more interesting to industrial design wonks than the divided backlight on the '63 coupes, was that side windows were subtly curved in plan and section. This expenditure was a sign of the power held by Styling VP Bill Mitchell's department over, for example, Zora Duntov and the engineering staff, who had to wait until the '65 model year to get 4-wheel disc brakes. The engineering crew did get independent rear suspension for '63, though, while customers lost the trunk lids featured on all earlier Corvettes.
The '63 Sting Ray was tested in a wind tunnel, but there were still front-end lift problems because of the horizontal ledge encircling the car, a key feature of the original XP-87 Sting Ray road racer design from 1959, which was produced by Larry Shinoda and Pete Brock (later of Cobra Daytona fame) under Bill Mitchell. In case you wonder what one looks like with paint intact, the specimen below showed up at the local Coffee and Classics.
Ironically, though the Split Window is considered by fans to be the most valuable of the production model 1963 Corvettes, the most valuable 1963 Corvette of all doesn't have that divided rear window. Only 5 Grans Sports of 125 planned were built before GM abandoned its factory racing program to defeat Shelby's Ford-powered AC Cobra; there were 2 roadsters and 3 coupes. The coupes deleted the center divider to enhance rear vision, and the front bottom radius of the backlight was increased to provide clearance for the fuel filler and also to avoid cracks in the fiberglass, which was thinner than on the production cars. Another irony is that the Grand Sport coupes had the one feature lacking on production Sting Rays that customers wanted back: a deck lid. In the case of the race cars, though, it was just to access the battery and differential cooler...
Photo Credits:
All photos are by the author except for the bottom shot of the Corvette Grand Sport, which is from the Revs Institute.
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