GM general managers in the 1960s didn’t give up easily, however. Often the ones who succeeded were those who challenged corporate policy to gain their ends. They never ceased testing the limits of their authority. Now Knudsen green-lighted Duntov’s other racy recommendation, which was closely related to the new Sting Ray.

This had certain advantages. As part of the existing Corvette program, a special car could be brought into being without the need to expose it to the critical gaze of the GM Engineering Policy Committee, the powerful group that met monthly to approve new divisional product developments. With a minimum of fanfare within the Corporation, in the summer of 1962 Chevrolet Engineering started working on the car they came to know best as the “light-weight Corvette”.

Their premise differed little from the reasoning that led Ford to back Shelby’s Cobra. In 1962 the FIA realigned its World Championship for Manufacturers to make Grand Touring cars eligible to win, those being cars that were approved or homologated by the FIA as having been built in a quantity of at least 100 in a twelve-month period according to a single specific design spelled out in the official homologation papers submitted by the manufacturer to the FIA. For 1963 there was to be no upper displacement limit on the engines of such GT cars. This was an open invitation to American auto builders to compete for Manufacturers Championship points in qualifying events like Sebring, the Targa Florio, Le Mans and the 1,000 Kilometers of the Nürburgring.

Those who had backed the idea of the “light-weight Corvette” were audacious enough to believe that it could not only beat the other GT cars but could also be capable of taking overall wins. It was to be founded on the brand-new all-independent suspension geometry of the Sting Ray, to be a replica of the new coupé built to the lightest possible weight consistent with reliability. The relatively high aerodynamic drag of the coupé was to be overcome by the installation under the hood of a truly formidable amount of horsepower. And 125 of these Grand Sport Corvettes were to be built and sold on a first-come, first-served basis.

In his Grand Sport, Duntov was able to realize the kind of Sting Ray he had wanted to build all along — only moreso.

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by Karl Ludvigsen

Photographs: Ludvigsen Partners

Bunkie Knudsen and Zora Duntov completed only five of their Grand Sport Corvettes before their plans to build 120 more came to a “screeching halt”. Those five were destined to compete but against outright sports-racers instead of the Cobras they were built to beat. They fared remarkably well.

Chevrolet was not going to take the Cobra challenge lying down. No sooner had it introduced its all-singing, all-dancing Sting Ray Corvette than Carroll Shelby came up with his Fairlane-engined AC hot rod and homologated it as a production car with both the FIA and SCCA. No standard ‘Vette could get close to the much lighter Cobra, so Chevy decided to build a featherweight Sting Ray to fight back.

By producing 100 it could qualify its Grand Sport as a production car; it aimed to make 125 in all. The cars would be sold to private owners who would compete; there would be no Official Chevrolet Racing Team. But after the first five cars were completed they ran straight into a stone wall: GM’s staunch reaffirmation of its 1957 commitment to an industry ban on corporate racing.

“Duntov was incredulous,” wrote Zora’s biographer Jerry Burton. “”He thought his rationale of letting customers race the Grand Sport was a sound means of getting around the letter of the AMA ban. The beginning of the 1963 racing season was a painful one for Zora as he watched the Shelby Cobras destroy everything in sight. Duntov’s disgust turned to anger and ultimately determination. His orders from upstairs were not to build any more cars but nothing was said about the cars that had already been built.”

These were still very early days for the Grand Sport, which except for its suspension geometry and drive train was totally different to the standard Sting Ray. The first five cars were intended as test vehicles. Only one of them had had much running. Thus as a racing car it was severely underdeveloped. There was little in the way of the spare parts that a serious racing effort would require. The engine Zora had planned for the car had not completed its development when the ban was reinstated. Worst of all, now the Grand Sports would have to run against out-and-out sports-racers, not production cars. Their victory chances would be minimal.

Notwithstanding these odds against success, Zora decided to loan two completed cars to very close friends of the Chevrolet Division, men who could be counted on to put them to use without talking about them too much. Indeed, it was stated that they had bought them, which was not the case. One was Dick Doane, a Chevrolet dealer in Dundee, Illinois whose Performance Engineering Division was a staunch Chevrolet ally. The other was Gulf Oil Research executive Grady Davis, a passionate racing enthusiast.

Both plain-white racers went out the door of Chevrolet Engineering powered by standard L84 Corvette engines rated at a gross 360 bhp from 327 cubic inches. Detail changes based on the limited development program included a narrow spoiler across the hood, scoops atop the rear fenders to pump cooling air to the rear brakes and vent slots low in the rear of the body to help reduce the differential’s temperature.

Soon after he acquired it, in the spring of 1963, Dick Doane allowed his Grand Sport, number 003, to be taken to Meadowdale near Chicago for evaluation by Bill Muldoon of Auto Sports. “Fired up,” he said, “it sounded like a couple of Sherman tanks at play. Steering was quick — two turns from lock to lock. The close-ratio gearbox was smooth and positive and well positioned. The Sting Ray is a real torquer and literally gobbled up the turns, most importantly the short straights between turns. The car is a barn-burner…it’s loud, quick, hairy and responsive.”

With its engine virtually standard, the GS’s performance was a direct product of its lightness. “I had a feeling that with all its speed potential,” added Muldoon, “coupled with its light weight, the car would be skittish. I was right. I came to realize that the disc brakes characteristically needed warming up before they operated to full effect. But they were good brakes. The car has understeer, which is a tribute to its special suspension. Once a guy gets the hang of it he’s going to be mighty hard to beat because this car has plenty in reserve.” …

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by Karl Ludvigsen

Photographs: Ludvigsen Partners

Beside Jochen Rindt and Dieter Quester he was the only Austrian to take victory at a Formula 2 championship race. Success did not come easy to Jo, his budget was always tight and he had to work hard. Still, there was a time in the early 1980s when he looked like the most promising Austrian to follow in Niki Lauda’s footsteps, but it wasn’t to be. 30 years after his tragic death at Le Mans, we remember the charismatic Jo Gartner – engineer, racer and fighter by nature.

The 54th running of the Le Mans 24 hours race essentially finished at 03:12 hours on Sunday June 1st 1986. Following a gearbox seizure on the Mulsanne straight at 260 kph, the Kremer Porsche 962C driven by Jo Gartner turned sharp left in the barriers, somersaulted viciously, hit a telegraph pole and burst into flames as it came to rest. Gartner died of a broken neck. This violent end to the young Austrian's life extinguished all interest in the event. Gartner was a talented man full of life, whose determination to succeed against the odds had been within sight of fulfilment. Le Mans 1986 instantly became an exercise of futility.

Only the previous evening, the 32-year-old had been telling the author how sports car racing was just a job as far as he was concerned: a way of earning some money while he pursued all avenues to finance a way back into single-seater racing. With his Group C and lMSA GTP commitments, Gartner was not having to worry where the next meal came from, for the first time in his life. But the burning passion to be a Grand Prix driver, to which he and his longstanding girlfriend Doris had sacrificed nearly 10 years, was the motivation to continue racing in an area where he derived little satisfaction.

Jo was born in Vienna on January 24 in 1954. His father ran a small road car garage in the 2^nd district, next to the Prater areal. Right after high school Jo started as a junior draughtsman for Kurt Bergmann, the famous constructor of the Kaimann Formula Vee chassis. Soon the young Gartner began working on his own little projects and he started contesting some hillclimb events in 1976. His first circuit racing came during 1977 when he entered his Kaimann for the second half of the European Formula Super Vee championship. Jo immediately scored top-five results and despite missing half of the season, he finished ninth in the standings, best of the Kaimann drivers. The following year Gartner got himself a Lola chassis and finished third in the championship, beaten only by Helmut Henzler and Kennerth Persson. 

Early years: Super Vee & Formula 3

This marked Jo as a man to watch and with the support from Renault Germany and sponsorship from Jim Beam, Gartner graduated to the European Formula 3 trail in 1979. With a couple of friends, he prepared and ran the Martini chassis with the Gordini engine. But while Alain Prost ruled the year in his works Martini, Jo struggled in the overweight and less powerful customer car. Only at the season finale at Kassel-Calden did he show some potential and finished fourth. Overall the year was a waste of time and talent, but Jo Gartner was never one to give up easily.

As far as racing was concerned the year of 1979 marked a significant change for the small but highly motorsport-interested country of Austria: In September, the then double world champion Niki Lauda retired from Formula 1 with immediate effect, leaving a huge gap but also offering the opportunity for a possible successor. There was considerable young talent in the country and it soon became obvious that three men stood out from the rest: Markus Höttinger, Gerhard Berger and Jo Gartner. These three names would become the main characters in the thrilling and fascinating contest to follow in Lauda’s footsteps.

In 1980 the youngest of them, Berger, was still learning his craft in the Alfasud Cup. Höttinger and Gartner meanwhile had both entered the final stepping stone to Grand Prix racing. However, their Formula 2 campaigns could hardly have been more different. Guided by Dr Helmut Marko and promoted by BMW, Höttinger was racing a fully-funded works Maurer…

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by Ian Phillips & Andreas Riehl

Photographs: Ferdi Kräling, BMW, Michael Glöckner, Privatarchiv Helga Zach, Historisches Archiv Porsche AG

As 1980 drew to a close, several things happened that affected the direction in which BL Motorsport was headed. Firstly, BL Cars announced that it would cease production of the Triumph TR7 sportscar that had been the mainstay of BL Motorsport’s rally programme since 1976. On the racing side, the new Rover 3500 programme within the British Touring Car Championship had resulted in several wins and, for development, it was agreed that the Rover squad would share a test session at Paul Ricard with Williams Grand Prix Engineering who were BL-sponsored. Amid much publicity, BL Cars had just launched their new small car, the Metro, and FISA had announced that the new Appendix J would take effect from 1982, thus allowing Group B cars to compete for the FIA World Rally Championship. 

It was inevitable that during the dark winter evenings in the south of France, the two groups of engineers should talk of a new rally car for BL based on the Metro. These thoughts became reality in February of 1981 when a deal was struck for Williams’s engineers under Patrick Head to design and build a prototype.

The first issues that had to be decided were the engine and the layout. The Rover V8 was too big, but there was a Honda V6 in the pipeline, destined for the new Rover 800. Thus, it would be a V6, and the original plan was to have the engine in the front driving a transaxle at the rear. This was remarkably similar, though without the turbocharger, to the Ford RS 1700T that was also under development at the time. Then two things became clear. The first was that in a small car like the Metro, accommodating even a compact V6 in the front would place the seating position of the crew almost over the rear axle. The second was that, already in its debut year of 1981, the Audi Quattro with its four-wheel drive was re-writing rally car concepts.

By the middle of 1981, the Metro’s design saw the engine moving to the centre of the car and facing backwards with the gearbox in front of it and the step-off unit feeding shafts to front and rear differentials. With no immediate sign of the Honda engine and their Formula Two engine being ruled out on the grounds of being too intractable for rally use, it was decided to create an interim V6 engine by cutting two cylinders out of the Rover V8 and then welding the parts together again to make a V6. This would result in an engine of about two-and-a-half litres capacity. 

Naturally, the question arose whether to use forced induction that seemed to be an essential part of the Quattro’s success. However, given the Metro's small size, packaging a turbocharger or supercharger plus all the intercooling and provision for heat dissipation would have been impractical. And if the V6 had stayed between 2.5 to 3.0 litres – the new Honda V6 was going to be 2.5 litres –, the turbocharging coefficient of 1.4 would have elevated the Metro into a class where its minimum weight would have been 1,100 kilograms. Most rally cars of the Group B era with forced induction engines eventually settled on engine capacities below 1,785cc so that their minimum weight was a mere 890 kilograms. In any case, in the early 1980s, electronic control of forced induction engines was such that they did not respond readily in the way that a normally aspirated engine could do.

One problem for the Metro programme was the lack of resources or, in plain words, finance. The company was going through a difficult time with Sir Michael Edwardes sorting out the industrial relations while senior managers strived to solve the development and marketing problems. In 1982, the company was renamed Austin Rover Group with Jaguar and Unipart becoming independent; moreover, the MG name was revived. Thus, the Metro rally car became the MG Metro 6R4 – standing for six cylinders, rally and four wheel drive – while its interim engine was known as the V62V – a vee-six with two valves per cylinder. The financial situation was helped when Harold Musgrove, now the chairman of ARG, decided that motorsport should be better supported and that it should report to Mark Snowdon, ARG’s Managing Director.

Long development period

By October 1981, the first of five V62Vs was running on the dynamometer, but it took most of 1982 to design and manufacture the transmission, using all of the expertise within Williams plus a little help from people like Mike Endean and Robin Herd. The first fully functioning car turned a wheel at the beginning of February 1983. It was delivered to ARG Motorsport on February 7th, and testing got under way immediately. Security was achieved by using nearby Chalgrove Airfield and then ARG’s own facility at Gaydon. It was at Chalgrove on a frosty morning in March that Steve Soper, pressed into service from the Rover racing team as a test driver in the absence of Tony Pond, had the dubious honour of being the first person to put a 6R4 on its roof…

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by John Davenport

Photographs: McKlein