<VV> Karl Ludvigsen and Corvairs

[Tony Underwood]

At 06:51 AM 11/8/2010, Karl Haakonsen wrote:
>After reading Tony Underwood's email, I did some googling and found 
>a reference to a 14-page article in the Automobile Quarterly in 1970 
>(volume 8, no. 4) entitled "Remember the Corvair? - Here's a Look at 
>What We Lost."
>
>Does anybody have a copy of this?


I have a hard copy hidden away in a file cabinet somewhere in the 
other house... I know, doesn't help anybody right now.   However, for 
the moment maybe this might prove of interest:

_________________________________________________





Getting to Know Corvair

For a few months in the summer of 1956 I worked in the Research 
Studio at GM's Styling Staff. It was headed by Bob McLean, a 
charismatic and mercurial Californian who doubled as engineer and 
industrial designer. When I arrived I found a yellow Jaguar D-Type in 
the studio. Borrowed from racer Jack Ensley, this was the car that 
Harley Earl threatened to restyle and power with a Chevrolet engine 
to race at Sebring if Chevy didn't get its act together. Chevy 
finally did, building the superb Corvette SS, a version of which 
later raced as the original Sting Ray.

That's where I first saw Bill Mitchell in action. Bill, then director 
of design under Earl, was overseeing the creation of the SR2 version 
of the Corvette for racing. He came into our studio to oversee the 
measurement of the D-Type's headrest to serve as a pattern for the 
SR2's design. Two years later Bill would be running the place after 
Earl's retirement.

On one of the desks in the Research Studio I found a binder packed 
with an array of fascinating studies of small-car designs. This was 
the work of British-born engineer Maurice Olley, who headed 
Chevrolet's research activities in the early 1950s. "One of the 
projects we put to him was the development of the transportation 
car," said Ed Cole, Chevy's head until 1956, "one that could do for 
Americans what the Volkswagen was doing for Europeans. It was a 
simple statement of the problem and the objective. Naturally we 
analyzed all the available foreign cars and their configurations and 
we cost-estimated many of them."

Cole and his colleagues were thinking about building just such a car 
at Chevrolet. "The project started to take definite shape in 1954," 
he related. "It was accelerated about 1955 and we decided on the 
basic configuration for the Corvair in the spring of '56." In August 
of that year a corner of the Research Studio was commandeered for the 
first scale-model studies of the styling of Chevy's new small car. 
Soon thereafter I left GM to join Sports Cars Illustrated as technical editor.

In May of 1959 I returned to the Big PX from Germany, mustered out of 
the U.S. Army Signal Corps. I'd accepted the post of editor of SCI, 
which I took up in the autumn. I made contact with Stefan Habsburg, 
fellow MIT man and Research Studio designer, to find out what was 
happening. Chevy's small car was coming along well, he told me. The 
experienced Bob Schilling had designed its suspension, he said, which 
was elegant and independent at all four wheels. "Special builders 
will love it," Stefan said.

One of my first official acts in my new post at SCI was to go to 
Detroit in July of 1959 to cover the Corvair's introduction. One stop 
was downtown at the GM Building where, in Chevrolet's offices, a 
fabulous exhibition of the available photographs was organized. This 
was the work of Chevy PR man Myron Scott. A legend in his own time 
for his invention of the Soap Box Derby, Scotty created brilliant 
images for the Corvair's launch. One showed a ladle pouring hot 
aluminum on the engine parts while another was a heat scan from the 
side that showed the warmth of the engine at the rear. His color 
images were handsomely backlit to ease selection.

Next stop was GM's Proving Grounds at Milford to the north-west. This 
was my first of many visits to Milford, a magnificent facility where 
each GM division had its own facilities to exploit a fabulous array 
of demanding roads. There I was taken under the wing of Bob Clift, a 
Chevrolet test driver and tall Chuck Connors lookalike. We worked 
with a black Corvair four-door; the two-door coupe and other models 
were still in the offing. After taking pictures of its details, both 
on the ground and on a lift, we set out for Milford's roads.

Clift, an experienced Corvette racer, showed off the new Chevy's 
agility. It was impressively stable going in reverse as he 
demonstrated. Then we tried climbing a soapy inclined plate that had 
been set up specially for this demonstration. While an Impala 
couldn't surmount it the Corvair went up as if it wasn't there.

Above all I was interested in the Corvair's handling. How well had 
Chevrolet's engineers coped with the challenge of a car with 62 
percent of its weight on the rear wheels? As I said in my column of 
December 2006, I was pretty sure Chevy would have come up with some 
clever gizmos to prevent heavy terminal oversteer. However when I 
tried the car on the truck loop's big turning circle I discovered 
that this wasn't the case. A drastic differential in tire pressures 
from front to rear was the main palliative technique. In the event it 
wasn't enough.

Overall, however, the Corvair-now celebrating its 50th birthday-was a 
remarkable achievement. In my SCI story I said, "It looks as if Ed 
Cole threw up his hands and said, 'Okay, okay, I've had enough. Let's 
build this car that all the critics and magazines have been asking 
for and then see how they like it.'" I called The Corvair "the most 
profoundly revolutionary car, within the framework of the U.S. 
automotive industry, ever offered by a major manufacturer." Still true.

- Karl Ludvigsen