Fifty Years of the Corvette Grand Sport

The full story of the Corvette Grand Sport told in this book reaches almost 100 years of automotive history. The author played an important part of it for sixty of those years. In 1953 Chevrolet introduced the Corvette to make inroads with the youth market that had been favoring Ford. Shortly thereafter, Zora Duntov joined Chevrolet and quickly became a leader of its fledgling performance push. By 1957 the Chevrolet division had closed the gap to Ford with younger consumers, but GM's brass abruptly cut GM's involvement in racing and dialed back the marketing of high-performance cars. Despite official policy, in 1963 a new generation Corvette emerged with Zora Duntov as its chief architect. Duntov supplied private teams with the hardware to continue Corvette domination in road racing, but Carroll Shelby had just introduced the Ford-powered Cobra. The Cobra was a thousand pounds lighter than the new Corvette and easily dominated. Duntov countered by putting together a team to build special lightweight Corvettes that would weigh even less than the Cobras. They were called Grand Sports, and Duntov's team built five of a planned 125 cars before the GM board ordered production halted and the cars destroyed. Duntov hid two cars and shipped three to Texas oilman John Mecom, who resold them to fellow Texas racers Delmo Johnson and Jim Hall, and the author, Alan Sevadjian. The new owners continued to race their Grand Sports until they were no longer competitive. During the next forty years, Alan built and raced Corvettes. In 2004, he was approached by a local businessman who asked him to make a clone of the Grand Sport Alan owned and raced in the 60s. Since Chevrolet owned the trademarked name "Grand Sport," Alan called his new car a "Duntov Lightweight," and trademarked that name.

This did not go unnoticed by the lawyers at General Motors, but fortunately for Alan, the head of the GM legal team was a racing fan who had met Alan and thought it wise to introduce the Grand Sport to a new generation. Instead of suing Alan for trademark infringement, he offered Alan a GM license to continue the original production run of 125 cars. For ten years Alan built and raced the continuation Corvette Grand Sports. The story of this car and its reincarnation is captured in this book with more than 450 pictures that span ninety-six years of automotive history.