In one of the major US car magazines(maybe Automobile?) they have an editiorial on the Z06 Corvette , saying it is a great car but now it's timefor Chevrolet to go mid-engined on the Corvette. While crazy in one way--why would they want to go from 30,000 sales annually to 2000 annually like Ford does on the GT--in another way it would be great for car enthusiasts in the U.S. because at last we would have worthy competitors.
Only trouble is , it takes three years minimum to get a new design into production and unless they have been hiding a mid-engined car other than the now cancelled Cadillac Cien, GM doesn't have one.
So let's say they start today, the soonest a mid-engined Corvette could reach the showrooms would be 2009 or 1010, by which time the Ford GTs will be history once again.
Someone told me"failure of nerve"is too cruel a phrase to use to describe GM executives who cancelled previous mid-engined Corvettes but I can't think of any way to describe it that's more accurate, especially when Ford executives went ahead and did it not once but twice with the Ford GT.
A sub-note is that Jim Hall, who was secretly helped by Ford in the Sixites when developing the Chaparral, is putting one of his mid-engined racers into limited production again, so even he sees a need for a mid-engined Chevy. Wonder where it will race--I thought Steve Earle , doyen of the Monterey Historic,was dead set against replicas....
Only trouble is , it takes three years minimum to get a new design into production and unless they have been hiding a mid-engined car other than the now cancelled Cadillac Cien, GM doesn't have one.
So let's say they start today, the soonest a mid-engined Corvette could reach the showrooms would be 2009 or 1010, by which time the Ford GTs will be history once again.
Someone told me"failure of nerve"is too cruel a phrase to use to describe GM executives who cancelled previous mid-engined Corvettes but I can't think of any way to describe it that's more accurate, especially when Ford executives went ahead and did it not once but twice with the Ford GT.
A sub-note is that Jim Hall, who was secretly helped by Ford in the Sixites when developing the Chaparral, is putting one of his mid-engined racers into limited production again, so even he sees a need for a mid-engined Chevy. Wonder where it will race--I thought Steve Earle , doyen of the Monterey Historic,was dead set against replicas....
