In 1952, GM styling head Harley Earl and a small team of designers set out to create an American sports car using innovative fiberglass body construction. Crowds thronged the resulting roadster – the Chevrolet Corvette – at the 1953 GM Motorama. A production version, powered by a warmed-up Chevy six, followed. A few years later, GM engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov gave Corvette its high-performance heart. Duntov massaged Ed Cole's elegantly simple and lightweight 1955 Chevy small-block V-8 into a racing engine competitive in most any arena. By 1956, a Corvette race car with the right factory authorized parts could give nearly any car in the world a good run. And that was just the beginning.