It’s fitting the C8 Corvette graces the cover of the 70th anniversary print issue of MotorTrend magazine (get the September 2019 on newsstands beginning August 2). We’ve grown up together, you see.
“We wanted a magazine that would interest the foreign car exponent, the sports car enthusiast, the custom car fan, and also be equally interesting to the stock car owner,” original MotorTrend editor-in-chief Walt Woron wrote as he put the finishing touches on the September 1949 issue. “A magazine that brings you the trends of the automotive field: designs of the future, what’s new in motoring, news from the Continent, trends in design.”
MotorTrend founder Robert Petersen’s personal connection with Southern California race car builder Frank Kurtis perhaps explains why he chose the Kurtis Sport Car as the first cover car for his new magazine—rather than, say, a Chevrolet sedan, America’s top-selling car that year. But the choice was also an eerily prescient confirmation of MotorTrend‘s mission statement.
Within two years of the Kurtis appearing on our cover, a senior GM executive in Detroit had instigated a secret backroom program code-named Project Opel, a proposal for a fiberglass-bodied sports car that, like the Kurtis, used many regular production car components under its shapely skin. The GM exec’s name? Harley Earl. And the car? Well, it first came to the public’s attention as the EX-122, one of the stars of GM’s 1953 Motorama Show at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. But you know it better as the original Chevrolet Corvette.
Frank Kurtis had the idea. GM had the money.
Today MotorTrend is more than just a magazine. It’s a video on demand service, linear TV channels, a website, and a social media phenomenon—an automotive content creator and curator with an audience that now spans the globe. MotorTrend has grown up. So, too, has the Chevrolet Corvette. The C8 is still America’s Own Sports Car, but with its mid-engine layout, it’s built to take on all comers, from Italy’s Ferrari to Britain’s McLaren and Germany’s Porsche.
I can’t wait to drive it.