Car Profiles

1963 Corvette Split-Window Coupe

Sean Smith··
Last updated:

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.

Members only$35 / year

Keep going. This is where it gets good.

CorvSport Membership is for people who’d rather spend an hour inside one engine option than skim ten headlines. The rest of this story — and every other one like it — is a few seconds away.

  • Every members-only story

    Deep history, market reports, buyer’s guides, and the full archive back to 2010.

  • No ads. None.

    The whole site reads like a magazine, on every device.

  • Every model year, 1953 to today

    Production numbers, VINs, RPO codes, colors, options — one page per year.

  • 30% off the shop

    Every CorvSport shirt and piece of merch, all year.

Join CorvSport — Keep Reading

$35 a year. Cancel anytime, no hoops.
Already a member? Sign in

BY CORVETTE PEOPLE, NOT A CORPORATION. Your membership keeps a small independent team of historians, photographers, racers and writers doing this.