The Chevrolet Corvette rolled out of Flint, Michigan in 1953 and has never stopped—eight generations, no domestic rivals left standing. It nearly didn't happen. Chevrolet was bleeding market share, and brand manager Thomas Keating saw a sports car as the only remedy. The answer was fiberglass over a 3.9-liter straight-six, two-speed automatic— America's answer to the lean British roadsters of the postwar years. It debuted at GM's 1953 Motorama in the Waldorf-Astoria, made it to production, and promptly sold almost none of its 300 hand-assembled units. A quiet, uncertain beginning for what would become America's sports car.
The ZR-1 finally reaches dealerships in 1990 after 84 pre- production units spend 1989 unseen by the public. It stays in production through 1995. Under the hood: a dual-overhead-cam 5.7-liter V-8, designed by Lotus, assembled by Mercury Marine, producing 375 horsepower routed through a ZF six-speed manual. We run one to 60 mph in 4.5 seconds and keep our foot down until the speedometer reads 175. The rear wheels are 11 inches wide—wide enough that the doors and rear body panels had to be designed around them. In 1991, we line it up against a Porsche 911 Turbo. The ZR-1 wins. As we write at the time: " it goes faster."
