Interesting historic: Corvette Grand Sport (Not For Sale)

We featured a photo of the rear of a Corvette Grand Sport we admired at Lime Rock during the historic races. It really is historic. At Monday’s races we were able to speak with one of the owners about some of the unique features of the car. A little history…the Grand Sport project was formed by a bunch of Corvette engineers who somehow managed to get an unlimited budget to build a car to vanquish the Ford Cobras domination with the Daytona Coupe. The result is this magnificent Grand Sport. The car was successful right out of the box when they beat the Daytona at the first race in Bermuda. There was hope that they would get to build a bunch of them but when the brass got wind of the project, all of the engineers were reassigned to street cars once again. The car has kiddie bicycle rocket ship lights tacked onto the rear and a similar treatment up front. We asked why and the answer made a lot of sense. The rules required you have front and rear lights that worked. The engineers didn’t want the car sidelined if an electrical issue killed the main lights so they installed battery-powered kiddie lights as back-up. Not effective but clever. There is also a big “X” in metallic tape across the roof. They needed that because the 2-way radio antenna required metal to send/receive and of course the roof is fiberglass. Metal tape was the answer. Ingenious.