![]() Little by little glimpses of automotive history would come out - things that put today, and the 1971 Corvette, into perspective: That he had worked with a brilliant engineer named John Dolza on the Rochester fuel-injection and the system is fundamentally sound today except that cubic inches are a cheaper way to horsepower that the "Duntov" cam was an emergency horsepower device he developed when Chevrolet wanted to crack 150 mph on Daytona Beach in 1956 the contempt Duntov feels for the body shape of the 1963-1967 Sting Ray because it had "just enough lift to be a bad airplane." Later, when the driving is finished for the day, there is dinner and maybe a few drinks and more talk - talk about what it was like back when the Delahayes and the Talbots were trying to knock off the Mercedes and Auto Union juggernauts on the Grand Prix circuit about how Duntov got the idea for the "Ardun" cylinderhead conversion while driving his flat-head Ford wide open across France one day before the war about what it was like to work with Sydney Allard and drive an Allard at Le Mans and lose, then to switch to Porsche and win the class the next two years in a row.īut whether it is between courses at dinner or while the condensation was running down a Martini glass, Corvettes are never far below the surface. No rational excuse for driving along at double the posted speed limits in any other state. Bad enough to spend a day driving to Nevada, but to tempt the worst kind of destruction by running a 454 Corvette right up to the redline in top gear and hold it there is damn near unAmerican. But when that logical, practical conscience does break through, it is not amused. Keeping the car, and yourself, on the straight and narrow is so much a hairtrigger operation that it takes your logical conscience about three miles to break through your concentration - you haven't got time to carry on a mental debate about the morality of what you are doing. In this high-velocity never-neverland all your senses need reorientation: A road that looks mirror flat pitches you violently up and down the air makes tortured noises you hear right through the glass as it scrapes over the top of the windshield an unseen force slowly twists and tortures the outside mirror until it surrenders and ends up pointing skyward. ![]() ![]() And the suspension, which felt like flint on Sunset Strip, is supple, almost loose. ![]()
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