Presented by Vicari Auction Company

Have you seen all the 2020 Corvettes in the news and online" Well, they are all going to be crushed or crash-tested because they are illegal. Because they are prototypes, they have no titles or a VIN that can be registered. What if a prototype escaped"

That is what happened in 1962 when these three Corvettes were smuggled out by their creator. Zora Arkus-Duntov was a Belgian professional racer and automotive engineer. Being Jewish, he and his brother barely escaped the Nazis and landed in New York.

After the war, every soldier wanted to make more power from the Ford Flathead. Charting a path all his own, he developed an overhead cam conversion kit. It allowed the small V8 to make 300 horsepower, and they are still popular in the modern era.
1953 Corvette

One night in 1953, he saw one of the first Corvettes in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. He was so disappointed in the ancient six-cylinder and 2-speed automatic that he wrote Chevrolet asking to address these issues. He was hired as an assistant engineer to Ed Cole, with the goal of making the car perform.

He saved up his vacation time to race for Porsche at LeMans in ’54 and ’55, and Chevrolet top-brass asked him why. Zora explained how superior the Porsche 550 RS was, and that Corvette could learn from it. At LeMans in 55, he narrowly avoided the worst crash in history.

A decade later and the 10th anniversary of the Corvette would b...