For the original Corvette nothing was more important than a drive train that would do justice to a true sports car. Working with the available material an authentic racer, Mauri Rose, extracted enough horses delivered through a controversial transmission.
Chevrolet’s R&D Department, under the leadership of British suspension expert Maurice Olley, had full responsibility for the design of the underpinnings of the sports car that carried shop order (SO) 1737. As Olley told the Society of Automotive Engineers a year and a half later, “On June 2, 1952 Chevrolet engineers were shown a plaster model of a proposed car of 102-inch wheelbase, for which a chassis was required.
