Rare Corvettes · One of one

XP-819, the rear-engine Corvette

It is the only rear-engine Corvette Chevrolet ever built, it was born out of a bet, it crashed into a wall, it was condemned to death, it was cut apart — and it is, remarkably, still with us. The XP-819 is the closest the Corvette ever came to being a very different car.

Chevrolet R&D — 1964

The XP-819 grew out of a genuine disagreement between two strong-willed engineers. Frank Winchell, who ran Chevrolet R&D, believed a balanced, aluminum, rear-engine V8 sports car was possible — and that it could be the Corvette's future. Zora Arkus-Duntov, whose own vision put the engine in the middle rather than behind the rear axle, was deeply skeptical. When Winchell's team threw together a quick, crude running prototype to prove the point, Duntov took one look and dubbed it the “ugly duckling.”

To make the idea presentable, Winchell brought in Larry Shinoda — the designer behind Bill Mitchell's Stingray Racer and the Mako Sharks — who reworked the shape into something genuinely handsome in about two months. Under the skin sat one of only two monocoque chassis Chevrolet ever built, with a small-block V8 hung out behind the rear wheels.

Into the wall

The pretty bodywork couldn't fix the physics. With most of its weight hanging behind the rear axle, the XP-819 was a handful, and during a high-speed lane-change test it got away from its driver, slammed into a wall, and bounced off it repeatedly — ending up a wreck. Winchell's rear-engine argument, at least in that form, was over. Duntov had been right about the tail-heavy layout, even as the deeper question — whether the Corvette's engine belonged somewhere other than the front — would haunt GM for another half-century.

Condemned, and saved

In 1969 Chevrolet ordered the wrecked prototype destroyed and handed the job to Daytona mechanic Smokey Yunick — the same Smokey Yunick who had tuned Bill Mitchell's SR-2 and Betty Skelton's Daytona Corvette. Yunick cut the car apart and stripped its useful parts, but never finished the execution; the remains sat in his shop for decades until a Chevy dealer tracked them down. In 2002 Mid America Motorworks founder Mike Yager bought what was left at a Monterey auction and handed it to master restorer Kevin Mackay of Corvette Repair, who brought the only rear-engine Corvette back from a box of pieces. Today it stands, whole again, at the mid-engine era's spiritual home: the National Corvette Museum.

Notice the recurring cast — Shinoda's pen, Yunick's shop, Mackay's restoration bay — that keeps turning up across the rarest Corvettes. That's the thread running through the whole rare Corvettes collection.