In January 1953, Zora Arkus-Duntov wrote an enthusiastic letter to Detroit.
Born in Brussels to Jewish-Russian parents, he saw a car at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City that immediately captivated him;
a new sports car with a plastic body, which rotated there on a revolving stage: the Corvette C1.
The engineer, who was trained in Germany and immigrated to the USA from France in 1939, had attended the Motorama show of the car manufacturer General Motors and then enthusiastically turned to the company headquarters.
Shortly thereafter he had a new job: on May 1, 1953 he started as an engineer at Chevrolet.
On the team responsible for the Corvette.
Arkus-Duntov was there on a mission.
He wanted to turn the spectacularly styled car into a technically top-class sports car.
For example, the Corvette was also offered with a V8 engine (in addition to the original six-cylinder engine) from 1954 onwards.
Or by mechanical fuel injection from 1957 for more power.
What could not be changed, however, was the basic layout of the Corvette with front engine and rear wheel drive.
But above all Arkus-Duntov would have liked to change that.
In 1967 he saw his chance.
He'd been promoted to chief engineer for the Corvette.
In addition, Ford with the GT40 and Lamborghini with the Miura had only recently presented brilliant mid-engine sports cars.
The result of his dreams was in the spotlight at the 1968 New York Auto Show: the Chevrolet Astro II concept car. The sleekly designed two-seater was just 1.12 meters high and finished in Firefrost Blue paint. It looked fantastic - and it had a mid-engine.
A 7-liter V8 power plant was placed directly behind the seat backs.
Anyone who saw the car automatically asked themselves: Is this the next Corvette?
From a driving and technical point of view, the word should have been clear.
Unfortunately, from an economic perspective, things looked very different.
A mid-engine layout would have messed up GM's platform strategy.
In addition, the third Corvette generation, which first appeared in the fall of 1967, sold brilliantly, with 28,566 units sold in the first full year of sales – more than ever before.
It is logical that the GM management rejected the design change favored by Arkus-Duntov.
True to the Chevrolet motto: "Do not fix what is not broken."
After all, the Corvette received a revised rear section from model year 1974, which was extremely similar to that of the Astro II study.
The concept car itself, however, remained unique.
And the numerous other attempts by Arkus-Duntov for a mid-engine Corvette, which he undertook until his retirement in January 1975, had no consequences for series production.
Only the current, eighth generation of the Corvette, which was presented in the summer of 2019, is the first mid-engine model in the long line of ancestors of the US car icon.
Unfortunately, Arkus-Duntov, who died in 1996 at the age of 86, was not able to live to see it.