Rare Corvettes · Three built

The Corvette Indy

By 1986 the mid-engine Corvette dream had been killed so many times it was practically a ghost story. Then Chevrolet built the Corvette Indy — a carbon-tub, mid-engine rolling laboratory stuffed with technology a decade ahead of the showroom, and named for the race engine that was supposed to power it.

Built in 1985 and unveiled at the 1986 Detroit Auto Show, the Corvette Indy was less a styling exercise than a bet on the future. Its structure was a carbon-fiber and Kevlar tub — exotic-car construction years before it was common — and it carried a technology wish list that reads like a modern supercar: four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, drive-by-wire, a rearview camera feeding an in-dash screen, and Lotus active suspension, which GM was keen to show off as it moved to acquire the British engineering firm.

The engine in the name

The “Indy” came from the plan to power it with Chevrolet's Ilmor-built Indy-car V8 — a compact 2.65-liter twin-turbo said to make around 600 horsepower. That race engine was ultimately dropped, and the running prototypes were fitted instead with the 32-valve, Lotus-designed LT5 V8 — the very engine that would soon power the C4 ZR-1, the “King of the Hill.” So the Corvette Indy wasn't just a dream car; it was the rolling test bed for the Corvette's most exotic production engine.

The Corvette Indy never had a shot at production — it was too complex and too expensive by far — but it did its work as a showcase, and it fed straight into the twin-turbo CERV III that followed. It belongs to the long line of mid-engine Corvette prototypes that kept the idea alive until the C8 finally built it. See the rest of the rare Corvettes.