Description
In February 1964, the author and founder of Duntov Motor Company, Alan Sevadjian, saw his first Corvette Grand Sport at an SCCA event at Green Valley Raceway in Smithfield, Texas. It was driven by Dallas Chevrolet dealer Delmo Johnson. The image was unforgettable, and ten months later Alan bought his own Grand Sport from John Mecom, and at nineteen years old, he began a lifetime association with that car.
The Grand Sport was not politically correct. It was outrageous in every aspect of its being. It was too light, too fragile, too powerful, and too much for Carroll Shelby’s new Cobras. It was also too much for GM’s Board of Directors, and the project was cancelled before it really got started.
This book tells the rest of the story of what preceded the Grand Sport, why it was built and then summarily cancelled, and what transpired fifty years later when GM licensed the continued production of their iconic car. The author had a front row seat for both ends of this drama.
It is a story that has its roots in the era when the great American automobile manufacturers were trying to identify a new post-war car market and somehow get a handle on a growing interest among young people in hot rods and high-performance automobiles. Alan’s life was largely consumed by the Grand Sport for the four years between Green Valley and a sudden intervention by the U.S. Navy in 1968. Forced to sell the car, he found little interest and finally had to let it go for $5,000. Thirty years later the car’s market value had increased more than a thousand fold. Widespread interest in the Grand Sport had finally matched Alan’s original enthusiasm.
An earlier effort at telling this story was commissioned by a customer who asked Alan to write it down in book form. That basic outline took the better part of four months, but this book required an additional year to produce. It contains 382 pages, 74,000 words, and 540 photographs, many of which have never before been published.