I love Corvettes like this. Crude, butchered old race cars are as big a part of Corvette history as the colour red. Photo from the Jim Hill Collection.
This was an all-out street machine drag car. It was a black first-gen, I believe 56-57, with the single headlights. The indentation on the side of the body was either silver or white, and it was rolling nose-high on big-and-little aluminum slotted mag wheels. There was a hardtop installed, painted black to match, and a roll bar inside.
There was no hood on it as it cruised around the fairgrounds of the show, loping away with a cross-ram intake manifold on a small-block Chevy backed by a four-speed manual. I saw it parked later that day, and there was a pin-down hood sitting beside it on the grass, Chevy orange, with an absolutely enormous fibreglass hood scoop bonded onto it. I’m guessing the car once had a tunnel ram or supercharger to need a hood scoop that big, but I never got a chance to ask.
The best part? The car was clean, but it was beat. You could tell that it lived a hard life the whole way through. There was no visible evidence of a crash, but there was also no evidence of restoration. It was perfect. Could it take a corner? Aggressively when new, but gently with its current nose-high stance and greasy straight-line tires. I thought that thing was the coolest Corvette ever about a decade ago, and then I saw this picture of the Mongoose.
It’s one thing to modify a car into a drag car, but the Mongoose is borderline mutated. Pete Arend of Florida was your typical rich guy who got into a hobby and threw money at it until it was what he wanted. A 1963 Corvette was a fast car back in the day, but when it’s not fast enough with a Chevy big-block, what’s next? A Hilborn Injected Chrysler 426 Hemi, of course. Backed by a 727 automatic and a Halibrand quick-change differential, this was a fast Corvette.
The engine was set back 25%, and the independent front suspension was replaced with a lighter straight-axle and buggy spring setup more commonly found on older cars. Out back, the independent rear axle was sprung with coil-over shocks. The rear quarter panels were cut out to fit big tires, and the four taillights were increased to six, the most common modification ever for a custom Corvette of this era.
What happened to this car? Funny cars started to come onto the scene, and Pete Arend did the rich guy thing and got bored of it, sold the car, and switched hobbies. Where is it now? No one seems to really know. As long as the old bodywork is still structurally sound, I’d like to see someone get it going and do some vintage-class racing with it. Sure, you could build a clone of it, but with the price of these cars and that engine nowadays, you’d need some serious rich guy money to do that.
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk
