People · Zora Arkus-Duntov · Chapter 9 of 11

Backdoor Horsepower

Chevrolet Engineering — the big-block years

By the mid-1960s Zora has accepted the rules of his strange war. General Motors will not race. General Motors will also, if the paperwork is boring enough, happily sell anything. So the racing department Zora cannot have becomes a single line of type on the Corvette order form — and the men in the know learn to read option codes the way spies read classified ads.

The masterpiece of the genre arrives in 1967: RPO L88. On paper, an odd purchase — a 427 rated at 430 horsepower, five less than the glamorous tri-carb L71 sitting cheaper on the same page. The rating is a lie, and it is Zora's favorite kind: a lie aimed at the wrong customers. The L88 is a competition engine in street clothes — aluminum heads, a wild solid-lifter cam, 12.5:1 compression demanding 103-octane racing fuel, a single massive four-barrel — and the real output lives up around 550 horsepower. To keep boulevard cruisers away, ordering it strips the car of a radio and even a heater, and the true number appears nowhere. The customers it was built for already knew.

The engine does exactly what it was born to do. At Sebring in 1967, the L88's competition debut in the Sunray DX Corvette ends with Don Yenko and Dave Morgan taking the GT class win. At Le Mans that June, the Dana Chevrolet L88 coupe of Bob Bondurant and Dick Guldstrand is clocked at 171.5 mph on the Mulsanne straight — leading GT at nearly half distance when the engine finally lets go. The message crosses the Atlantic intact: the fastest thing on the longest straight in racing was a Corvette a customer could order from a Chevrolet dealer in Ohio.

GM's official policy was silence. The L88's official policy was 171.5 miles per hour.

Zora's final escalation lands in 1969, when the aluminum-block program he began for the Grand Sport's stillborn 377 reaches its destination: RPO ZL1, a 427 cast entirely in aluminum — an engine lighter than the small-block yet stronger than the iron 427, essentially a Can-Am engine with street plates. The option costs more than the rest of the Corvette underneath it, which is one way to guarantee exclusivity: just two production ZL1 Corvettes are built, instant unicorns, the most extreme expression of the front-engine Corvette until the modern era.

And yet — walk through Zora's private ledger at the end of the decade. The production car is faster than ever, and heavier than ever, its big-block nose pushing ever more mass at the front tires. The Cobras are gone, but Ford's GT40 has won Le Mans four times with its engine mounted where Zora has said the Corvette's belongs since the CERV I. Every lesson points the same direction. He has the power. What he wants is the layout.

The last campaign of Zora Arkus-Duntov's career is about to begin — the one he will wage right up to his final day in the building, and in a sense for twenty years after that.