Making the Baby Corvette.Pdf
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Making the Baby Corvette Was Opel's short-lived GT really a Corvette clone, or did the inspiration flow two ways across the Atlantic? Mike Lamm looks into the third generation's baby brother. People call it "the baby Corvette." And there's no question that the 1968-'73 Opel GT and the 1968-'73 Corvette C3 look a lot alike. Nor did that similarity come about by accident. I became curious about the design connections between the GT and C3 a few months ago, after buying myself a pristine, one-owner '70 Opel GT. Not only was the little coupe surprisingly fun to drive, but in the course of researching its background I discovered that a familiar name was in charge of all Opel styling during the model's development—none other than Clare (Mac) MacKichan. If that name rings a bell, it's because Mac was responsible for the design of the classic 1955-'57 Chevrolets, the '57 Corvette SS, and many other important Chevys. I interviewed him several times before he passed away in '96, and I knew that he'd headed the Chevrolet studio from '52 to '62, first under Harley Earl and then under Bill Mitchell. As I continued my preliminary research, the question became: Did one car exert an influence on the other? And, if so, which lent its lines to which? Was the GT truly a "baby Corvette," or did the C3 come about as a larger version of the Opel—a GT on steroids? One misconception I frequently ran into was the recurring contention that Corvette designer Larry Shinoda was the man behind the GT's final design. I soon discovered this was certainly not the case; Shinoda, whatever his role in shaping Corvettes over the years, had nothing to do with the GT. On Clare MacKichan's 44th birthday, 10 March 1962, Mitchell sent him to Russelsheim, Germany, to take over Opel's small, provincial design department. Mitchell promised to bring him back to Detroit within five years and, at the same time, instructed Mac to change Opel's image. Give Opel some style, he told MacKichan; make it, in the words of Chuck Jordan, "less of a German farmer's car." Mac promptly oversaw construction of a new, larger Opel Design building and quadrupled the size of its staff. He also soon noticed young Opel designer Erhard Schnell doodling sketches of small, handsome sport coupes. Schnell had been sketching these designs on his own since before MacKichan got there. On the strength of Schnell's drawings and enthusiasm, Mac made the young stylist manager of a new advanced-design group and specifically asked him to refine his sport-coupe ideas. Mac saw such a car as a natural way to appeal to a younger, less farmerly set of potential Opel buyers. Erhard Schnell was born in 1927 and grew up in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1944, at age 17, he was inducted into the German navy and promptly captured by Allied forces, who imprisoned him until the end of 1945. Upon his release he enrolled in an art school in Offenbach, graduating in 1950. Schnell initially worked as a graphic artist for an ad agency and also for a manufacturer of automotive instruments. He joined Opel in 1952 and essentially stayed in Russelsheim until his retirement in 1991. Schnell speaks and writes English fluently, and he informed me that the Opel GT was only one of many designs he's proud of. Others include the Opel Rekord C, Manta A, Senator A, Vectra A and B, and the stunning Opel Calibra coupe. Schnell currently lives in a village near Russelsheim. Starting in the fall of 1962, Schnell and his small advanced-design group began generating a number of clay and fiberglass models aimed toward making a producible sport coupe. They worked pretty much in secret, Schnell's original goal being to give the new car a distinctly German look. The work finally progressed into a concept car called the Opel GT—a show car whose styling had yet to develop the overtly American themes of the later production machine. The GT had been done on the QT, very quietly, without much awareness on the part of Opel's upper management. "Mac was waiting for the right moment," Schnell told me. That moment came, apparently, when MacKichan put the GT concept on the Opel stand at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September of 1965. Suddenly there it stood, and most of Opel's upper management had a hard time getting their minds around it. This was no farmer's car. In fact, stylistically, the GT show car went far beyond anything Opel executives felt very comfortable dealing with. It was, as the saying goes, totally outside the box. Most of the division's German executives were genuinely shocked, and MacKichan picked up on it immediately. He also realized that, for the moment at least, this would probably make it difficult to convince Opel to build the GT. Fortunately, MacKichan's boss, Bill Mitchell, arrived at the Frankfurt show soon after it opened. According to Chuck Jordan, who succeeded MacKichan at Opel in 1967, Mitchell rarely missed a major European auto show, and whenever he traveled abroad—maybe four times a year—he nearly always stopped in at Opel Design. Mitchell felt that those were good times to check design progress firsthand and to make small course corrections if and when they were needed. Other attendees at the 1965 Frankfurt show included GM chairman Fred Donner and GM's overseas vice president Semon E. (Bunkie) Knudsen. Unlike Opel's own management, Mitchell, Donner, and Knudsen weren't at all shocked to see the GT concept. In fact, they quite liked it. While the show car didn't yet have the feel of a producible, finished design, they sensed that a sporty two-seater could be just the thing Opel needed to give its image a swift kick up the desirability ladder. One Opel executive who wasn't shocked, and who lobbied early on for the GT's production, was Robert A. Lutz—GM's current vice-chairman—who was then working as a lowly Opel marketing executive. Lutz recalls that, "The original [Opel GT program] was started in '62 by Mac MacKichan. It was wider and flatter than the ultimate production version, and it did not have the C3's 'swollen' front fenders. The early design was more Germanic- looking, like something Porsche might have done. "I encouraged Opel (I was very junior at the time) to put the car in the Frankfurt show. It proved to be quite a sensation, and after a lot of internal hassle and corporate criticism from Detroit (how dare we show a concept car without prior permission?!), we actively planned production." Donner, Knudsen, and Mitchell also encouraged Opel's top management to produce the GT—and, predictably, within a very short time the project was given approval. Production was scheduled for late 1968. Opel engineering promptly recommended using the company's small, economical Kadett platform and the 1.9-liter Four from the Kadett Rallye and Opel Rekord. Mitchell, meanwhile, suggested to MacKichan and Schnell that the production GT should be made to look more American, since he felt—rightly, it turned out—that most Opel GTs would be sold by US Buick dealers. Start, Mitchell instructed MacKichan, by looking at the styling cues that had first appeared on the Corvair Monza SS roadster and Monza GT coupe, a pair of American concept cars shown for the first time in '62. Both Monzas pointed toward the styling direction Mitchell already had in mind for the 1967 (later moved back to '68) Corvette; now he wanted to expand their example to the new Opel GT. Mitchell also called MacKichan's attention to the Mako Shark II concept, which was first seen in public in April of 1965, five months before the Opel show car’s Frankfurt debut. While the Mako Shark II did contain all the key styling elements of the third- generation Corvette, at the time Mitchell was guiding MacKichan no productionized version of the Chevrolet had been penned. To GM Design the twin Monzas, Mako II, and Opel GT were still just a series of showcars. According to Ed Taylor, a retired GM designer who became MacKichan's assistant at Opel in 1966 (George Gallion and Tony Lapine also joined Opel's design team around that time), Mac's routine was to talk with Mitchell once a week on the telephone. Mac would also send notes and photographs to his boss on a regular basis, and these images arrived as the design of the C3 continued to evolve in Michigan. As a result, both cars—the GT and the C3— developed pretty much simultaneously from the same stylistic DNA. That said, one of Ed Taylor's particular assignments was to "Americanize" the GT—to make it look more like the upcoming C3 in detail. He did this by lifting the knife edges of the front fenders and refining details such as the parking lamps and bumpers. These modifications were minor, however, compared to the general proportions and themes which evolved on the cars independently. In his email, Bob Lutz goes on that, "For cost and investment reasons, we based the production Opel GT on a modified Kadett platform, which caused, for me, the car's most significant aesthetic shortfall: track too narrow and wheels too far inboard. At any rate, once we were headed for production, Mac, as he did with everything, had to airmail weekly progress photos to Bill Mitchell.