Corvette In the Doldrums

Ed Cole fought to keep his Corvette alive. Some 1955 models were powered by Chevy’s new V-8. Zora Arkus-Duntov arrived but he would need time to defend and enhance a sports car that many in GM considered was ready for the chop.

“Considering the statistics, the American public does not want a sports car at all,” engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov told the Detroit Section of the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1953, adding, “but do the statistics give a true picture? As far as the American market is concerned, it is still an unknown quantity since an American sports car catering to American tastes, roads, way of living and national character has not yet been on the market.”

This man with the startlingly unusual name, prematurely gray hair and thick Central-European accent had excellent credentials to speak on the subject of sports cars. Belgian-born, raised in Russia and educated in Berlin, Zora Arkus-Duntov was active in racing-engine design and supercharging during the 1930s. “While I was still a student,” he recalled, “I acquired some repu­tation for being a good tuner. This was on motorcycles, even though my first car was a racing car. That was a German racing car and I got into it because of very heavy objection from my parents about the motorcycle racing.”

In New York in the 1940s Zora and his brother Yura designed and built the famous Ardun hemispherical-chamber heads for the Ford V-8, then short of supercharging the most potent hop-up aid for the famous flathead. Arkus-Duntov’s racing career included a Grand Prix Talbot-Lago, Cisitalia, Allards, Porsches—winning his class at Le Mans—and in 1960, for the last time, at Lime Rock, Connecticut in a Grand Prix 250F Maserati. Through early 1953 Zora was an engineering con­sultant to Porsche, then Mercedes-Benz, finally Sidney Allard.