I’ve just put the finishing touches on an upcoming feature story, about the test mule that was
the car on which the ’96 Corvette Grand Sport option package, and that year’s optional F45
Selective Real Time Damping suspension system, were developed.

That car is in the collection of the National Corvette Museum, donated by Delphi Automotive Systems a couple of years ago. That was when that particular Admiral Blue ’95 Corvette coupe
was set for culling from the house fleet at Delphi, having served as an around-town errand runner long after its days as a test bed were completed. As such, it was received in as-driven
condition, which it remains in to this day. Which means that it has plenty of the “sands of time” on its underside, and under its hood—where a preproduction LT4 smallblock resides.

You have to wonder: What kinds of “errands” did this car run? Routine plant-to-plant trips? Routine plant-to-GM-Proving Grounds-and–back trips? Routine plant-to-Pizzeria
Uno-in-Chicago-and back trips?

Ah, the fun that one can have with a piece of history, before it’s known that the car IS a piece of history.  (Insert your own Corvette factory test car daydreams here, especially the
more vivid ones.)

As this is written and posted the second week of May, there’s a lot of activity around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Notable for Corvette lovers is this year’s 500-Mile Race will be
paced by a Vette for the tenth time since 1978, by an E85-fueled concept car. And, for the first time since 1998, there’s an Indy Pace Car Edition Corvette available for sale in a limited edition. A total of 500, split between coupes and convertibles, will be built with a black-and-silver color scheme, and a distinctive option package, similar to the first Vette IPC of ’78.

By the numbers, the ’78 IPC is the second-most numerous of all the pace-car-edition Corvettes, as 6,502 replicas were built. The most-numerous Vette IPC replica? The 1986 one, as Chevrolet
dubbed all 7,315 ’86 convertibles Indy Pace Cars, and included Official Pace Car graphics with each one.

As for the other Pacevettes, there were a total of 527 replicas built in 1995 and 1,158 in 1998. However, in 2002, Chevy didn’t offer an IPC Corvette, but they did offer the Official
Pace Car graphics through GM Service Parts, which sold about 300 sets of them. For 2004-06, no IPC replicas were offered by Chevrolet, while last year, 500 IPC replicas—all convertibles—were made.

That makes a total of 18 times that a Chevrolet has paced the 500, starting with the Stovebolt Six-powered Stylemaster convertible that three-time 500 winner Wilbur Shaw drove to pace the ’48 race. That count jumps to 19 if you include the time that brand co-founder Louis Chevrolet drove the pace car (a Chrysler Imperial E-80) in 1926.

A historical “what-if” could’ve bumped that total to 20, if Studebaker hadn’t been able to substitute its Lark Daytona convertible to pace the ’62 500 in place of the Avanti, whose
development glitches were keeping it out of production (and sales competition with the Corvette) for what turned out to be a full year. I suppose that Chevrolet could’ve stepped in and offered any of its drop-tops (Corvette, Impala or Chevy II) to the Speedway then—after all, 1962 was Chevrolet’s Golden Anniversary year. And it would’ve made for the ideal place to give the C2 Sting Ray its first public showing…if they could’ve wrestled the prototypes away from the Chevrolet Engineering crew for long enough!

While we’re “what-iffing” here, try this one on for size.

Suppose…for a moment…that a bunch of engineers and other devoted “car people” who worked for Chevrolet in ’63, when GM President Frederick Donner instituted the company-wide racing ban, made off with CERV I and headed to Indy to race it there, regardless of what anti-racing “wisdom” came forth from The Fourteenth Floor.  

Imagine this: Under cover of darkness (and with the strains of Elmer Bernstein’s title theme to the movie The Great Escape in the background), a fleet of Chevy C60 trucks pulling the trailers
containing CERV I  and all the spare parts needed for a run at the 500 rolls out of the GM Tech Center, and makes its way southwestward. (Remember, this is before I-69 was completed between mid-Michigan and Indiana, and before the I-465 loop around Indianapolis was built, too.)

Arriving at the Speedway, CERV I is rolled into one of the garages in Gasoline Alley, then made ready to steal the thunder that the Blue Oval folks were building up with their Ford-powered
Lotus 29s. Can you imagine CERV I going head-to-head with the Lotuses (Loti?) and the front-engined Watson-Offy and Kurtis-Offy “roadsters,” especially with a talented driver like
Zora, Betty Skelton, or Phil Hill driving CERV I?   

Can you imagine the look on Henry Ford II’s face when a well-used, two-year-old Chevy test mule puts his itty-bitty “Total Performance” cars, built with FoMoCo corporate support that Enzo Ferrari later called “Cubic Money,” on the trailer on Pole Day…then runs away and hides from them on Race Day?

One problem that the winning driver of CERV I would’ve had back then: What to do with the Official Pace Car that was part of the winner's prize package. That year, the pace car was a Chrysler 300!