Detroit's Secret Weapon

A secret car, known to a handful of General Motors employees as XP64 and to the inner circle at Chevrolet as "the bug," emerged last week from behind the orange doors of a large, hectic room in Chevrolet's plushy new Engineering Center. Outsiders with an ear to the ground had been expecting an all-out racing sports car, but vital details were missing. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED here presents—along with exclusive photographs—the first full story of the Corvette SS.

The electrifying reality is that the SS (for Super Sport) is the first true racing car to come from Detroit—an epic surprise thrust by Chevrolet at the eleventh hour for this Saturday's world championship sports car race at Sebring, Florida. With only a week to go, the company was dickering with World Champion Driver Juan Manuel Fangio to take the wheel.

Introduced as a research laboratory on wheels, Chevrolet's trail breaker is a stripped sports racer, not a touring-racing combination. Potentially it is the peer of the world's finest and fastest machines of this kind. It is essentially a straightforward car which nevertheless explores new engineering principles. Its great singularity, however, lies not in its machinery but in the fact that nothing remotely like it has come from the U.S. automobile industry since its reorganization from a cluster of individualistic enterprises into a few corporate giants which have made the word Detroit mean the mass production of American passenger cars.

Having come of age last year, the Florida International 12-Hour Grand Prix of Endurance (to give the Sebring race its proper title) is taking another giant step. By far the most significant sports car race in North America, it gives U.S. stay-at-homes their only opportunity to see the renowned drivers and cars which play to an enormous following in Europe; it gains immeasurable new stature from the advent of the SS.

When Chevrolet unveiled a production Corvette with promise of racing success last year, that was considered astonishing enough by those who had commenced to believe Detroit would continue to downgrade sports cars. The promise was fulfilled handsomely enough for Corvette to win many Sports Car Club of America races—and this, in turn, undoubtedly figured in Jaguar's decision to produce a potent new production version of its all-out D-type, also named, like some fine prewar Jaguars, the SS.

Now comes Chevrolet with a car nearly 1,000 pounds lighter than the production Corvette, more powerful and more tractable. The aerodynamic body is of lightweight magnesium alloy; light, strong metals are utilized where applicable. Possibly remembering the abortive comeback of France's famed Bugatti last year, Chevrolet is being sensibly cautious about the car and is prophesying no miracle at Sebring. The Bugatti, as you may recall, made a disappointing showing for 18 laps in the 1956 French Grand Prix and then retired, never to appear again, despite Bugatti's fabulously successful prewar racing history and wealth of racing engineering experience.

Chevrolet has had no such experience, and Sebring, moreover, is a brutally exacting course—part airport runway and part asphalt road—which is a great destroyer of cars. Says Zora Arkus-Duntov the expatriate Russian engineer who developed the SS for Chevrolet: "We will need enough luck to overthrow the government of Russia and feed all the hungry Chinese. There isn't that much luck in the world."

The grapevine says, however, that initial tests by Driver John Fitch on the course itself have exceeded expectations, especially in the vital matter of handling qualities.

Given certain reservations about Detroit's cloudy future in racing, the SS, even though unproved, remains a lustrous accomplishment. It has been only five years since General Motors Styling produced the first plastic Corvette body shell and asked Chevrolet Engineering to put something inside it; only five months since the SS began to incubate on the drafting boards; only a week since the new baby was assembled in final form, with the briefest of practice periods available before race time. There was no handbook by Dr. Spock, with all the answers, to consult during the lying-in. No one really was certain that all the bugs would have been expunged by 10 a.m. Saturday. There was even a chance, early this week, that the car might not race at all if its preparers felt it could not perform adequately in so short a time. Whatever develops, the SS is a car of fundamental importance and a much-needed shocker to shake U.S. motor racing from the doldrums of isolation and sameness, regardless of the positive engineering advances which may well accrue to Chevrolet.

Here is the car in detail: