The original Corvette launched in June 1953 with a straight-six borrowed from Chevrolet’s regular passenger cars, a two-speed automatic as the only transmission, and a body made of a then-novel material, fibreglass, chosen to keep tooling costs down for a car GM was not sure would sell.[1] It nearly didn’t survive its first two years. What saved it was Chevrolet’s first V8 since 1919, offered from 1955, which turned a curiosity into a performance car and set the pattern (bigger engines in the same light roadster body) that every Corvette since has followed.
By the time the C1 gave way to the C2 in 1963, the same basic car that began at 150 hp was available, at the top of its range, with a fuel-injected small block making 360 hp: not a straight line of improvement so much as nine years of the engine bay absorbing whatever GM’s small-block program could throw at it.