Photos courtesy GM Media.
He didn’t conceive of the Corvette. He didn’t shepherd it from concept to production. He didn’t drive one to a championship. He didn’t have much to do with its styling. Yet Zora Arkus-Duntov is, inarguably, the most important person in the history of Chevrolet’s fiberglass-bodied sports car, so it’s only fitting that Bloomington Gold induct him into their Great Hall next year.
Born in Belgium in 1909, Duntov began racing motorcycles and cars when he was 18 and parlayed that interest into a degree in mechanical engineering from the Institute of Charlottenberg in Berlin. He, his wife, and his brother fled Europe in 1939, settling in New York, where he and his brother engineered and produced the Ardun hemispherical overhead-valve cylinder heads for the flathead Ford V-8. As legendary as the Ardun heads became, he and his brother couldn’t sell enough to remain in business, so in 1950 Duntov went to work for Sydney Allard, both to assist in producing Allard’s Ford-engined sports cars and to race them. From 1952 to 1955, Zora drove in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the first two years in Allards and the latter two in Porsches.
In 1952, Duntov returned to New York, where, a year later, he visited the Motorama at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to see the new Corvette. That encounter inspired him to write a letter to Chevrolet’s Ed Cole, who in turn hired Duntov as an assistant staff engineer. Duntov, who eventually became the Corvette’s chief engineer, made it his mission at GM to turn the Corvette into a true sports car; to that end, he pushed for the small-block Chevrolet V-8 to replace the Corvette’s six-cylinder engine, he introduced Rochester fuel injection to the Corvette, and he added independent rear suspension with the Corvette’s first major redesign in 1963. Until 1975, when he retired from Chevrolet, Duntov continued to guide the Corvette’s development and to ward off attempts by Chevrolet and GM to cancel the sports car, and even after his retirement and up to his death in 1996, Duntov remained an ambassador for the Corvette. In addition to his Great Hall nomination, Duntov has also been inducted into the SEMA Hall of Fame, the Automotive Hall of Fame, the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame, and the National Corvette Museum Hall of Fame.
Fittingly, one of the cars that Bloomington Gold will induct into the Great Hall in 2013 will be one of Duntov’s signature creations, the 1963 Corvette Grand Sport. As Karl Ludvigsen noted in Corvette: America’s Star-Spangled Sports Car, the FIA’s GT-favorable rules changes for the 1963 season were “an open invitation to American GT car builders, most clearly the Corvette, to compete for Manufacturers Championship points.” Duntov took the invitation as an opportunity to build a no-compromises lightweight Sting Ray, one that would use a custom tubular frame, four-wheel disc brakes, a hand-laid fiberglass body designed specifically for racing, and a special small-block V-8 that featured all aluminum construction, a hemispherical cylinder head, twin plugs per cylinder, modified Rochester fuel injection and as much as 600 horsepower out of 402 cubic inches. The end result weighed as little as 1,900 pounds and promised to compete head-on with Shelby’s Cobras, but GM’s early 1963 reiteration of its ban on racing spiked the Grand Sport project after just five – out of a planned run of 100 – were built.
Those five cars, however, did see plenty of track time the next few years. After some sorting out in SCCA C Production that year, three of the Grand Sports were entered in the 1963 Nassau Speedweek races by John Mecom and finished a respectable third, fourth, and sixth in the Governor’s Cup race. The other two were then modified into roadsters for use at Daytona in February 1964, but GM finally had enough with the covert semi-works nature of the Grand Sports, so the two roadsters were never raced and all five Grand Sports were sold off.
Along with Duntov and the 1963 Corvette Grand Sport, the 2013 Great Hall inductees will include Mike Antonick, Bloomington Gold, Reeves Callaway, Carlisle Productions, Chip Miller, Bill Mitchell, Jim Perkins, Dr. Dick Thompson, Mike Yager, the 1957 fuel-injected Corvette, the 1961 Gulf Corvette racer, the 1962 327-cu.in. small-block-powered Corvette, the 1965 396-cu.in. big-block-powered Corvette, the 1967 L88 Daytona Corvette racer, the 1987 Escort Series Corvette racer, the Callaway Corvette, the C5 Z06, and the C6 ZR1.
Initiated in 2010, the Bloomington Gold Great Hall was conceived to recognize the top 50 people and cars in the Corvette’s history by selecting 10 people and 10 cars every year for five years. The 2013 Great Hall induction ceremony will take place June 27-30 in its new location of Champaign, Illinois. For more information, visit BloomingtonGold.com.
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