‘PROJECT LIGHTWEIGHT’

LIGHT, POWERFUL, AND EXTREMELY RARE, THE 1963 CORVETTE GRAND SPORT IS ONE OF CHEVROLET’S TRUE HOLY GRAILS

In early 1963, five unique and very fast C2 Chevrolet Corvettes were built. The fact that each of those five still exists today is probably a very good indication of how special they are — they even survived the ’60s and ’70s, when all manner of crimes against enthusiasts were committed as rare cars of the era were crashed, crushed, and abandoned with little regard to their future holy grail status.

Known internally as ‘Project Lightweight’ and externally as the 1963 Corvette Grand Sport, these five wild machines — two built as roadsters and the other three as hardtops — would become the ultimate and most desirable Corvettes ever built.

To discover how this unicorn of the American sports car world edged its way into existence we need to start at the very beginning, with a legendary personality who would become forever linked to the Corvette. The story begins in 1953, when Belgian engineer and professional circuit racer, Zora Arkus-Duntov, first laid eyes on the C1 Corvette at a Motorama event in New York City. Duntov, a Jewish refugee who’d barely escaped Paris in 1942, with the Nazis nipping at his heels, is said to have been enamoured with the C1’s body design but disappointed by the engineering underneath.

Instead of just saying “Oh well”, as anyone else would, Duntov went home and wrote a letter to Ed Cole, the chief engineer at Chevrolet at the time. In the letter, Duntov laid out his thoughts on the Corvette, then explained how much he’d like to work on such a beautiful car. As a way of showcasing his abilities, he included a technical paper he’d drawn up that proposed an analytical method of precisely calculating a vehicle’s top speed. Cole was impressed, to say the least, and within weeks Duntov was in Detroit starting his new job as Chevrolet’s assistant staff engineer.

Over the next few years, Duntov rose through the ranks at GM, making big waves as he went. He’s credited with playing a part in changing Chevrolet’s image to make it more appealing to younger buyers and enthusiasts, as well as bringing the small block V8 and four-wheel disc brakes — a first for America — to the Corvette.

Next on Duntov’s hit list was taking it to the Fords, Ferraris, and Porsches that had been dominating the international endurance racing scene throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s. While the upcoming C2 Corvette ZO6 was a potent machine, it was going to need some serious revisions if it was to compete with the Shelby Cobras, Ferrari 250 GTOs, and Porsche 718s that had been tearing up circuits across Europe and the US. In mid-’62, Duntov quickly got approval from Chev’s general manager and motorsport enthusiast, Bunkie Knudsen, to build 125 new race cars. The problem was that — officially, at least — GM was still adhering to the 1957 gentleman’s ban on racing that had come about after the Le Mans disaster in that same year.

The plan was to build the 125 cars — the number required for European FIA homologation — in a clandestine fashion, and then sell each car to private teams around the world that may or may not have had varying degrees of unofficial factory support, in theory skirting around the manufacturer-backed racing ban. This reasoning was shaky at best, and meant that a skunk works style of operation was the order of the day.

The new endeavour was dubbed ‘Project Lightweight’ for a reason. Starting with an alloy tube frame ladder chassis and birdcage, the car received new paper-thin fibreglass body panels that lacked any type of gel coat, while handmade alloy and magnesium parts were knocked up to replace factory pieces wherever possible, and lighter organic aviation glass was used all round.

Weight was drastically dropped under the bonnet, too, thanks to the use of an angry aluminium 377ci small block V8 sucking down air and fuel through four 58mm side-draught Weber carbs and producing somewhere in the realm of 550hp.

The result of all this dieting was an incredible kerb weight of 862kg — down from the stock car’s 1451kg. Combine this with the small block’s impressive power output, and Duntov had a very, very fast car on his hands.

Initial testing — which was completed using a heavier fuel-injected 327ci production engine as the new alloy unit wasn’t ready — showed that, while the car was exceptionally quick, it did have some aerodynamic problems, most noticeably a tendency to lift the front end at high speed, resulting in light and sometimes non-existent steering when the driver needed it most. This was quickly rectified with substantial amounts of venting on the front end, bonnet, and arches of the number 001 test car before work got started on the initial run of production vehicles.

Of course, the team never got close to building the 125 cars that were planned, with only five materialising before the hammer of bureaucracy began to fall. Interestingly though, it wasn’t the flouting of the racing ban that particularly bothered the suits at GM — it was actually a concern over the US government’s anti-trust regulations, which aimed to stop some of the largest companies in the country from creating monopolies. The concern was that, should Chevrolet reach a 60 per cent market share, the government could force the company to split up in order to reduce its size — and Chevrolet was starting to come close.

With that in mind, the GM round table set its sights on Project Lightweight just as it was getting off the ground, reasoning that these machines had so much potential to dominate the competition that they might drastically boost Corvette sales across the country, thereby pushing Chevrolet over the dreaded 60 per cent line.

With that, the programme was cancelled and GM ordered that all five cars be crushed.

Duntov wasn’t going to have that, though. He still needed to prove that his Grand Sports were faster than any of the competition, so two of the five cars were hidden under covers in a seldomused part of the factory, while the other three were given to trusted privateer racers, who began campaigning them to mixed results, due mostly to teething issues and a lack of factory support.

Vindication came during the famous 1963 Nassau Speed Week in the Bahamas. This event had become the ultimate playground for hard-driving and hardpartying teams to show what they were made of, both on the track and at the bar. The three hardtops, numbers 003, 004, and 005, were shipped to the island and, due to the delicate circumstances, the ‘private’ team was superficially headed by Texas oil tycoon John Mecom Jr while a handful of Chevrolet engineers just happened to be taking a well-earned vacation on Nassau at the same time.

The Grand Sports qualified at the front of the grid, but had to drop out during the first Tourist Trophy race due to cooked differentials. In an incredible stroke of luck, one of those holidaying Chevrolet engineers just happened to have packed a couple of diff coolers in his luggage and was able to help fit them up.

The Governor’s Cup, which was the next race at Nassau, delivered, with the cars finishing third,

GTO. This proved that Duntov had the right idea, and even Carroll Shelby in later years said that his own success with the Cobra was only thanks in part to GM refusing to support the Corvette Grand Sport.

After Nassau, Duntov hoofed it back to home base, where he excitedly pulled numbers 001 and 002 out of their hiding places and began updating them with what had been learnt in the Bahamas — including chopping the roofs off both cars to turn them into speedsters.

The aim was to dominate the 1964 running of the Daytona endurance race. However, it wasn’t to be. Word of the success in Nassau got back to the top brass at GM and they’d had enough of Duntov’s sneaking shenanigans, ordering him to shut the programme down for good this time. Thankfully, though, all five cars avoided the crusher and ended