The Motion Performance Experience – Part II

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An Intimate Conversation With Martyn “Marty” L. Schorr and Joel “Mr. Motion” Rosen – Co-Founders of the Baldwin-Motion Supercars
Dateline: 8.10.17 / Photos:  Martyn L. Schorr & K. Scott Teeters’ Baldwin Motion Magazine Archives, Mecum Auctions, Dan McMichaels, & Google Maps – Part one of my 2013 Far Out Radio conversation with Marty Schorr and Joel Rosen is in the July 2017 issue of Vette Vues can be enjoyed HERE. The year 2017 marks the 50th Anniversary of the Baldwin Motion Experience. Before we get into the rest of my 2013 conversation with Marty and Joel I’d like to share an anecdotal story about setting up the interview.

I have known Marty Schorr since 1976, just after he started “VETTE Quarterly”, the first Corvette-only, newsstand publication. I’ve had numerous conversations with Joel since around 2000 and always found him to be polite, but very reserved. When I asked Marty if he’s like to me on my radio program he said, “Sure, I’d be happy to.” When I asked Joel, he said, “Well, okay, but I don’t really have that much to say. How long is the interview?” I told him I did a one-hour show and without the commercials and bumper music, we have around 45 minutes to talk. He said, “Oh… I really don’t have that much to say, Scott. Really.” So, I assured him that if he ran out of things to say, Marty would fill in the rest. When the show started, Joel was reserved, as usual, but quickly loosen up. Before I knew it, he was seriously bench racing! As the host of the show I carefully watch the clock. When I said, “Well guys, we’re just about out of time, Joel said, “What! We just got started!” That’s just what happens when car guys get to bench racing.
Continue reading “

The Motion Performance Experience – Part II” →

From Spoilers to Active Aero, What WE Might See on the C7 ZR1 & Mid-Engine C8 Corvette

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Published GM U.S. Patent Confirms New “Active” Aero System for the Corvette

Chevrolet has been extremely tight-lipped about the C7 ZR1, such that we have to look for other sources to glean info. Several months ago, published U.S. Patent documents indicated that GM is working on a new DOHC engine called the “LT5.” The conclusion is that the C7 ZR1 will have a double overhead cam version of the Z06’s LT4. Guestimations are that the LT5-powered ZR1 is pushing 750-horsepower – maybe more!
The April issue of Car and Driver showed artist renderings depicting the ZR1 sporting a very aggressive front splitter, big air intakes, an elaborate new hood, and a very angular rear wing with winglettes. Killer-looking stuff! But wait! There’s more!

On March 23, 2017 AutoGuide.com reported that on May 24, 2016, GM Global Technology Operations LLC filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office, Patent Application number 20170080770, titled, “VEHICLE RIDE-HEIGHT DETERMINATION FOR CONTROL OF VEHICLE AERODYNAMICS”. The “Abstract, Claims, and Description” are on the US Patent & Trademark Office – Patent Application Full Text and Image Database website. CLICK HERE to read the actual US Patent.
 Continue reading “

From Spoilers to Active Aero, What WE Might See on the C7 ZR1 & Mid-Engine C8 Corvette” →

Corvette Timeline Tales: July 22 2004 – A Commemorative Edition Coupe is the last C5 – VIDEO

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We just love “firsts & lasts” of any important performance car. Why? Because there are only ever two – the first and the last ones to roll off the assembly line.

Dateline: 7.22.17 – The First C1 and C2 Corvettes are not known, however, the Last C1, a black 1962 model sold for $150,000 at the 2014 Mecum Seattle Auction. We covered the Last Sting Ray, HERE. But today, we honor the “Last C5 Corvette”, which if you are looking to add an important Corvette to your stable of Vettes, just happens to be For Sale at BuyAVette.net! More about where you can pick up this piece of unique Corvette history for only, $1,000,000. (Karen, call the Credit Union!)

But for now, lets step into the CorvetteReport.com Time Machine and dial it back 13 years to 2004. To celebrate the success of the C5-R Corvettes winning Le Mans in ’01, ’02 and ‘03, Chevrolet dished up the 2004 Commemorative Edition option. This was an intense option to put into the production schedule because it was an open option on all three models of 2004 Corvettes – coupes, convertibles, and Z06s. On top of that, plant managers knew that as soon as the Last C5 was rolling through its journey of assembly, the production line was disassembled.
“Special Edition” Corvettes are always a tedious enterprise because all of the unique parts of a package have to be on hand. For Limited Edition Corvettes, at least it is known ahead of time that X-number of parts will be needed. However, with “open production” Special Edition Corvettes, the marketplace determines how much resources will be needed. From a sourcing and production position, it is a difficult task. Continue reading “

Corvette Timeline Tales: July 22 2004 – A Commemorative Edition Coupe is the last C5 – VIDEO” →

An intimate conversation with Baldwin-Motion Phase-III Chevy Supercar Creators, Marty Schorr & Joel Rosen – Pt.1

Published on by Scott

Marty Schorr & Joel Rosen set the story straight and tell how the Baldwin-Motion Phase III Supercar Experience came together. (4 Videos)

Dateline: 7.19.17 – This interview appeared in the July 2017 issue of Vette Vues Magazine. Part 2 coming soon! – Marty Schorr is the former editor of CARS Magazine, the founder of Vette Magazine, and is the current editor and chief of CarGuyChrolicles.com, and PMPR, an automotive public relations form. Joel Rosen is the former owner of Motion Performance, on Long Island, in New York, and currently owns and runs Motion Models, a world-renowned, scale military model company in Florida.

In June 2013 I had the pleasure of interviewing Marty and Joel on my radio program, “Far Out Radio.” And now, you get to read the story from the guys that made it happen – Marty Schorr and Joel “Mr. Motion” Rosen. The guys created a legend and we’re still talking about it over 50 years later!

You can enjoy Part 2 of this conversation, HERE.

Scott: Marty, Joel, welcome to the program.

Marty & Joel: Scott, we’re here, we’re here! (laughs)

Scott: Great to have you here all the way from Florida. You never thought it would go this long, did ya? (laughs)

Joel: I never thought I’d live this long!

Marty: (Laughing) We never thought it would go past the 1970s!
Scott: Really? And here you are, my goodness. So, now that I have you both here, I’m curious before we get into the story, have you ever been on a radio program like this together, talking about what you have done?

Joel: Oh yes, we’ve done a few programs and some television shows. A number of television shows.

Marty: Yea, we’ve done it and we’re still not tired of each other, which is amazing. (laughs)

Joel: That’s what he says! (both guys laughing)

Scott: It sounds like you are both soul brothers to me. So, were you guys bench racing over some beers, or which one of you came up with the Baldwin-Motion idea first? How did this all get started? Continue reading “

An intimate conversation with Baldwin-Motion Phase-III Chevy Supercar Creators, Marty Schorr & Joel Rosen – Pt.1″ →

Corvette Timeline Tales: July 12, 1967 – The Last C2 Sting Ray Rolls Off the St. Louis Assembly Line – VIDEO

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Photo: Proteam Corvette, Napoleon, Illinois, www.ProteamCorvette.com

The restored “Last Sting Ray” 1967 427/390 Corvette Coupe sells for a whopping, $660,000!

Dateline: 7-12-17 – Obviously there’s a first-and-last of every Corvette ever built. Unfortunately, there was no pause for celebration on July 12, 1967 when the very last C2 Corvette Sting Ray rolled off the St. Louis Assembly line. Not even a moment for a snap shot! Too bad! But forty years and three months later there was PLENTY of celebrating at the October 2007 Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale Auction.

Up until the last C3 rolled off the St. Louis assembly line, no one paid attention to these cars. The VIN number indicates that this was the last C2 Sting Ray to ever be built, Terry Michaelis, owner of ProTeam Corvette, in Napoleon, Illinois bought the rough Corvette Continue reading “

Corvette Timeline Tales: July 12, 1967 – The Last C2 Sting Ray Rolls Off the St. Louis Assembly Line – VIDEO” →

1,000,000th Corvette Restoration in 10:08! VIDEO

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It took seconds for the 1,000,000th Corvette to fall 40 feet and be nearly totally destroyed. I took almost a year to make the car GOOD AS NEW!

Dateline: 7.12.17 – The 1,000,000th Corvette, a white Convertible with a read interior (just like the first 1953 Corvette) rolled off the Bowling Green Assemble Line on July 2, 1992. Zora Arkus-Duntov was there to help celibate the event. Then, on February 9, 2014 the Ground under the National Corvette Museum’s Skydome display area opened up and swallowed 8 precious, special Corvettes.

The Corvettes that went into the 40-foot deep hole included;

1993 ZR-1 Spyder (on loan from General Motors) <– Beyond repair
2009 ZR1 “Blue Devil” (on loan from General Motors)<–Restored in late 2014
1962 Black Corvette <– Restored in 2017
1984 PPG Pace Car <– Beyond repair
1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette <– Restored in 2015
1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette <– Beyond repair
2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette <– Beyond repair
2009 White 1.5 Millionth Corvette <– Beyond repair Continue reading “

1,000,000th Corvette Restoration in 10:08! VIDEO” →

The Corvette Funny Car Curse – Fact, or FICTION – Videos

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For such a slick shape, how come so many Corvette funny cars ended in disaster?

Photo Credit: Hot Rod Archives

Dateline: 7-8-17 – No, this isn’t a whoo-whoo story that you might hear on Coast to Coast AM. A very interesting story popped up on HotRod.com, titled, “The Funny Car Corvette Curse“. Through the ’60s and ’70s funny car days, cars wearing a Corvette body shape, had unfortunate luck. There’s no metaphysical “curse”, it’s just aerodynamics. There are many variables.

But an honest look back clearly shows that the problem was with the front of the Corvette body. We were all looking at the curvaceous fender humps that looked a lot like Sophia Loren! How could it NOT be aerodynamic?

Photo Credit: Twitter – David Burge, https://twitter.com/iowahawkblog

In the zeal to produce fiberglass Corvette funny car bodies, builders made the body as “stock” as possible, stretching the car from the A-pillar forward. Continue reading “

The Corvette Funny Car Curse – Fact, or FICTION – Videos” →

Corvette Timeline Tales: July 8, 1955 – One of Five 1954 Corvette Nomad Show Cars BURNED!

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One of the five 1954 Corvette Nomad show cars that would today be worth over 1,000,000 was ordered destroyed by a bureaucrat!

Dateline: 7-8-17 – Norm Brown got a new job at Chevrolet, but little did he know that he’d be helping to send one of the five Corvette Nomad show cars built for the 1954 Motorama to the crusher. According to Mario van Ginnekin’s  ***  “Remarkable Corvettes” webpage, three of the five Nomads are known to still exist. “Why” one of the Nomads was sent to the crusher is not known. However, even though the ’56 Corvette with its updated body was about to go into production, the Corvette was not generally liked inside GM.

Photo: GM Archives

Also, by the end of the 1955 production cycle, Chevrolet had only sold 4,640 units from ’53 through ’55, which was NOTHING for a GM car. Continue reading “

Corvette Timeline Tales: July 8, 1955 – One of Five 1954 Corvette Nomad Show Cars BURNED!” →

The Story of the C3, C4, C6, and C7 ZR-1/ZR1 Corvette: Part 1 of 4

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From “Racer Kit,” to World Class Sports Car: Waiting for the C7 ZR1 & Looking Back at Past ZR1s

Dateline: 7/7/17 (This story was first published in the Sept 2016 issue of Vette Vues Magazine) 

Suddenly… its 2009 again! Is it “Déjà vu” all over again? It kind’a seems that way. In the summer of 2008, as the presidential election was heating up, Wall Street and the economy was shaking and quaking until finally in October 2008 the stock market crashed so badly that the candidates had to suspend their campaigns for a few days to vote on the big, bank bailout bill.

What followed was another deep recession that hammered the already stressed auto industry. 2009 was pretty ugly and the Mighty Wurlitzer, called “the Internet” was starting to get cranked up over C7 Generation Corvette speculation.
In 2007 Chevrolet sold 40,561 Corvettes – the best sales year since 1984 when 51,547 Corvettes were sold. Then in 2008 they sold 35,310 Corvettes. Yes, sales slipped, but that’s still an impressive sales figure. Then in 2009 the bottom fell out with only 16,956 Corvettes sold – that is a 48-percent drop! Continue reading “

The Story of the C3, C4, C6, and C7 ZR-1/ZR1 Corvette: Part 1 of 4″ →

George Haddad’s Factory-Style 1969 427 ZL-1 Corvette

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George Haddad’s Stunning 1969 ZL-1 427 Corvette – With some personal touches!

Dateline: 7.6.17 (VIDEOS AT THE BOTTOM!)  (This story was first published in the January 2016 issue of Vette Vues Magazine).

To understand the importance and uniqueness of George Haddad’s 1969 ZL-1 Corvette, we have to get into the “Vette Vues Time Machine” and go back to late 1968. The December 1968 issue of Hot Rod Magazine hit the newsstands like a thunder clap, with an obviously all-aluminum big-block 427 Corvette engine wearing bright yellow tube headers. It looked like Chevrolet finally had an ace trump card. The 427 ZL-1 was the ultimate “pie-in-the-sky” Corvette setup – big-block horsepower and torque – with the weight of an iron small-block! Duntov was a happy man because his dream of an all-aluminum engine for the Corvette went all the way back to the 1957 Q-Corvette concept that not only called for a fuel-injected all-aluminum small-block engine, but a trans-axle! (Sounds like a C5, doesn’t it?)

Duntov and his team tried casting SBC engines in aluminum, but there was a serious “strength of materials” issue that was never successfully worked out. The SBC was simply not strong enough when made in aluminum. A small batch of all-aluminum 377 engines were developed for the Grand Sport project that were powerful and light, but just wouldn’t hold together in competition. The prospect of an engine lighter than a regular SBC was deliciously tantalizing. So when the replacement for the 348/409/427 W-series (truck) engine, (the Mark IV) was being designed, an aluminum version was an obvious next step because the Mark IV was inherently a more stout structure.
The story of the production ZL-1 Corvettes is a long and complex one that we won’t try unraveling here, except to say that a batch of seven cars were built in early September 1969. The cars that “rolled off the St. Louis assembly line” were full-out RPO-L88 cars. The RPO-ZL-1 aluminum block was an option that was only available on an L88 engine. In other words, the ZL-1 was identical to the L88, except it had an aluminum block – making it 100-pounds lighter than the L88 Corvette, something that only racers would even notice. Continue reading “

George Haddad’s Factory-Style 1969 427 ZL-1 Corvette” →

Rollie Walriven’s Daytona Blue 1963 Split-Window Coupe

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Rollie Walriven, the single-owner of a Daytona Blue 1963 Split-Window Coupe

All of the photos in this post are by K. Scott Teeters

Dateline: 7.5.17 (This story was first published in the December 2015 issue of Vette Vues Magazine). We’ve all heard and perhaps have lived this story: Young man buys a Corvette, has a blast with the car, falls in love, marries, it’s time for a house, and the Vette is out’a here! “Life” often gets in the way of Corvettes. This is not one of those stories – no, just the opposite.

When Rollie Walriven took delivery of his brand new, Daytona Blue 1963 Corvette Coupe in November 1962, he was already a serious car guy. He had owned a daily driver 1959 4-speed Corvette with a mildly worked engine. He also had a basket case ’57 Corvette that he eventually built into a B/Production racecar that he started racing in 1964.Rollie was a typical post WW II car crazy kid. Of course his uncle’s dirt track racing in the Ohio region helped stoke Rollie’s interest in cars and racing. Rollie got his first car in high school, a 1939 Ford. Then he got a Model A Coupe that had been made into a hot rod. Continue reading “

Rollie Walriven’s Daytona Blue 1963 Split-Window Coupe” →

George Barris’ Out of This World – Asteroid 1963 Corvette Sting Ray

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The King of Kustoms’ George Barris’ Most Famous Corvette

Photo: Barrett-Jackson.com

Dateline: 6.28.17  (This story was first published in the April 2016 issue of Vette Vues Magazine) – Senior Vice President of GM Design, Bill Mitchell knew how to stoke a crowd. After the basic design of the new Sting Ray Corvette was approved for production, Mitchell kept Vette fans on the edge of their bucket seats with two Corvette dream cars. After the 1959 Stingray Racer won the SCCA C/Modified Championship in 1961 and was retired from racing, the car was refurbished into a show car. But that wasn’t enough. Mitchell had Larry Shinoda design a teaser Corvette to tip his hand, just a little, as to what the next Corvette would look like. The 1961 Mako Shark (the car wasn’t called “Mako Shark I” until after 1965 when the Mako Shark II was created) was based on a 1961 Corvette with styling hints of wild things to come. Actually, the car was a unique blend of a 1961 Corvette and the Stingray Racer.The ploy worked such that when the 1963 Sting Ray came out in autumn 1962, Bob Nordskog bought a new ’63 Split-Window Coupe and after only driving the car for 10 miles, took the new Corvette to Barris Custom Shop to be made into a drag/show car.

What’s not known is if the finished Asteroid was what Nordskog had in mind, or if he handed the new Corvette over to Barris and said, “Customize my Vette.” Custom cars tend to polarize opinions – people love them, or hate them. But from the perspective of 1963, the Asteroid was a hit. Continue reading “

George Barris’ Out of This World – Asteroid 1963 Corvette Sting Ray” →