The year 1963 was a big one for General Motors, the C2 was introduced that year. The lineage of the car could be traced to two separate projects, the Q-Corvette a design started in 1957 that got no further then a clay mock-up, and the Corvette Sting Ray (concept car) designed by Pete Brock, Bill Mitchell and Larry Shinoda, that took its cues from the short-lived Corvette SS racing project.
In 1959, elements from both the Q-Corvette and the Sting Ray racecar were incorporated into the project named the XP-720 at the GM styling studios. The idea was to build a production Corvette based on Mitchell’s racecar. An early clay model was pretty much the Sting Ray concept car turned into a coupe, in 1960 a second full-size clay model done by Shinoda was approved by the GM management. This would be the 1963 C2 Split Window Corvette Sting Ray.
