Chevrolet Corvette C2

The C2 is the high-water mark of Bill Mitchell's GM, and it exists because of an argument. Mitchell wanted drama - the pointed nose, the peaked fenders, the boat-tail deck, the split rear window he insisted was the spine of the stingray and possibly a nod to the Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic. Duntov wanted function, and thought the split window was a policeman-shaped blind spot. The lineage runs from Mitchell's own Stingray racer through the stillborn Q-Corvette and Shinoda's pen, with Pete Brock contributing early; the sharpness of the shape is Shinoda's, the theatre is Mitchell's. The 1963 car also carried faux hood vents and non-functional side louvers that British reviewers found gauche, and which quietly disappeared. What survived is remarkable: a shape that was radical in 1963, still looks modern now, and has never been meaningfully bettered by any Corvette since. The 1967 car - stripped of ornament, cleanest of the five - is widely considered the perfected version, an accident of the C3 running late.

The C2 is the generation that gave the Corvette credibility on a circuit. Duntov spent the era working around GM's own ban on factory racing, which is why the Z06 existed at all - a race-ready car you could order with a single option box, delivered through the dealer network while the corporation looked the other way. The five Grand Sports of 1963 were the sharp end of that: lightweight, purpose-built, aimed squarely at Shelby's Cobras, and killed by GM management before they could do their work. They remain the most valuable Corvettes ever made. The L88 was the same instinct four years later and far more successful - Hagerty's own valuation people credit it with making the Corvette a genuine threat to the Cobra in SCCA A-Production. One 1967 L88, chassis 21550, ran for eight years in privateer hands and took roughly 150 outright wins including a 52-race streak, plus a class second and 11th overall at the 1970 Daytona 24 Hours. Not bad for a car GM refused to advertise.

No American car is more reliably shorthand for 'sports car' than a mid-year Corvette, and the split-window coupe in particular has escaped the car world entirely - it is a poster, a die-cast, a shape people who cannot name a single Chevrolet still recognise. Route 66 had already made the Corvette a symbol of American freedom on television; the C2 arrived and gave that symbol a body worth the billing. It is the car of the astronaut era, when Alan Shepard's Corvette and the GM dealer leases to the Mercury Seven tied the fiberglass sports car to the space programme in the public mind. Sports Car International later ranked it fifth among the sports cars of the 1960s - respectable company for a car from GM's cheapest division. And it did something subtler: it established that America could build a sports car that Europeans had to take seriously. Duntov's own verdict, after driving the 1963, was the one that mattered: for the first time, he had a Corvette he would be proud to drive in Europe.

The 1963 split-window coupe is the one everybody knows and the only year it was built - Mitchell fought for it as the tail of the stingray, Duntov called it a visibility hazard, and Duntov won for 1964. It commands a premium over any other base C2. The 1963 Z06 was Duntov's racer kit at $1,818.45, with the 360hp fuel-injected L84, heavy-duty brakes and suspension: 199 built, and a handful with the 36.5-gallon fiberglass fuel tank that earned them the 'Big Tank' name. Big-blocks arrived in 1965 with the 396 (one year only), replaced by the 427 for 1966-67. The 1967 range is the connoisseur's year - L36 at 390hp, L68 at 400, the tri-power L71 at 435, the aluminium-head L89 (16 built), and above them the L88: 20 cars, 12.5:1 compression, 103-octane fuel required, no radio, no heater, and a factory rating of 430hp that was deliberately set below the L71's 435 so that nobody would order one by accident. It made something closer to 550. Above all of it sit the five Grand Sports, Duntov's lightweight Cobra-killers, which are not really road cars and not really for sale.

Buy the car, not the paint - the mid-year's problems are almost all structural and almost all invisible. Rust is the whole game: the steel frame rots at the rear kick-ups where the trailing arms pivot, and the birdcage inside the cabin rots at the windshield posts and door pillars, where it costs enormous money to put right because the bodywork has to come off to reach it. Fiberglass adds its own quirks - stress cracks around the bonding seams and windshield posts are near-universal on original paint, and bodged panel repairs are easy to spot once you know that factory panels are smooth on both faces. The independent rear suspension that makes the car so good also brought U-joints, half-shafts and trailing arms that want attention, and the 1965-on four-wheel discs corrode in the lines and calipers, which is why a stainless-steel replacement industry exists. Pop-up headlight motors fail and leave the car winking. None of it is mysterious, and none of it stops anyone - a sorted mid-year is one of the most rewarding cars of its era to own.