In automotive history, Chevrolet’s Corvette may indeed be the most iconic vehicle produced by an American car manufacturer. It has survived multiple decades of automotive change, from exterior design to structural engineering, all while maintaining a mystique that easily transcends any other vehicle make or model.
Get Corvette enthusiasts together for a discussion about the rarest model built and you’ll get a wide range of opinion, but it may be in the sports car’s earliest years when its rarest factory-produced model was built.
In 1956, the fiberglass two-seater was in trouble. General Motors executives saw the Corvette was simply not a big seller with Ford’s Thunderbird trouncing the Corvette in sales. The writing was on the wall. The end was near.
A small contingent of Corvette enthusiasts, not the least of which included Zora Arkus Duntov, were buried in the bowels of engineering and design at GM and they weren’t about to give up on what they saw as one of the truly great performance cars of all time.
During Corvette’s tenure it has experienced not only radical redesigns in form and shape, but its mechanicals have been the forerunner, in many cases, of the most iconic technical advances that GM introduced to its “public market” cars. And where did much of the development of new ideas happen? On the race track.
Of course, 1957 marked the final year of the tri-five “Classic Chevys,” which not only introduced some popular styling but also Chevrolet’s 283 V-8. The Corvette came standard with a base 220 horsepower single four-barrel 283 but you could pick two dual four-barrel versions, which provided 245 and 270 horsepower respectively.
But the hot performer was what came to be called the “Fuelie” with the new Rochester “Ramjet” fuel injection. Standard injection could be ordered in 250 horse versions (option codes 579A and 579C), but the fabled one-horsepower per cubic inch 283 could also be ordered using codes 579B and 579E. Of the 6,339 total Corvettes built that year, fully 1,040 were fuel-injected with 756 of those having the 283 horsepower rating.
While the 1957 “Fuelies” are rare collectibles today, the real story is the special cars, called Air Box Corvettes, that came right off the assembly line, filled with special pieces that were part of the 579E order code. There were 43 of these special Corvettes featuring heavy duty brakes, suspension, special steering, wider wheels (RPO684), no radio or heaters and a factory 8000 rpm tachometer bolted to the steering column.
A strange looking, rather crude “box” under the hood fed cooling air to the fussy fuel injection which welcomed that addition and tagged these vehicles as air boxes. The air box was hand-built and laid into the engine compartment on the driver side, displacing components which then had to be relocated elsewhere. It directed air from an opening located near the front grille to a tube connecting the fuel injection unit (where a standard air filter would reside) and split to an additional channel that was routed down to a body bulkhead below the door going back to the rear wheel well. Here the opening was specially routed with more handmade pieces that pushed air to the rear brake.
A similar bulkhead channel was constructed on the passenger side, this one fed by a single flexible tube which picked up air from an opening located on the opposite side of the grille opening. These fresh air intakes helped to cool the brakes which were another component of the cars that was modified or reworked during production runs as the air box cars entered competitions.
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