I grew up in Detroit, actually the suburbs.Before I moved West,
I bought a used Corvette around 1969 in the Detroit area and was told it had an LT1 engine even though it didn't have the special LT1. I bought it from an GM executive's son who said that it was put in experimentally. It might have been an LT1 because it had the LT1's nasty havit of throwing fan belts if you over-revved it on the downshift.
Anyhow I was wondering if anyone else has proved their Corvette's specal equipment was installed for some executive like Bunkie Knudsen, William L. Mitchell, Irv Rybicki, etc.

 

All my special equipment was installed by...me.

That's a cool story about your car though, do you have any pictures of it? Do you still have the car or even another Vette?

 

I'm sure a lot of that happened in the 50's and 60's; but I doubt that much of it was documented. That's back when a GM "no-code" exec could drive his personal car into the fab shop and have them do about anything they wanted.

 

The book "Birthplace of Legends" relates a story of a manager on the second shift at the St. Louis plant who wanted a '71 LT-1 convertible with an automatic transmission.

According to the book, plant employees could order "company cars"...cars that would be used for a few hundred miles then sold at a discount to the employee.

The book further relates "The manager secretly took an LT-1 engine, re-stamped it with the base engine code numbers, changed the intake manifold and valve covers, and sent it down the chassis line with an automatic transmission. Meanwhile, a base engine equipped body was being fitted with standard equipment, plus a few extras like air conditioning and a rear defogger."

The manager overlooked one detail...base cars were equipped with a 60 psi oil pressure gauge and LT-1 cars were given an 80 psi gauge.

The story goes "The scheme was progressing well until the plant's resident manager decided to take the car home for a routine, overnight test drive. When the engineer started the wolf in sheep's clothing, the needle on the 60 lb. oil pressure gauge pegged itself well beyond the three score mark. The stunned engineer immediately shut the motor off, and investigated the situation. When the made-to-order plot was discovered, the manager was dismissed and a correct engine was installed in the Corvette."

Now my question is how many similar switches could have been made that weren't caught? It's certainly within the realm of possibility that there could be some factory cars like that running around, but how can you document them?

BTW - I recommend the book...it's full of neat information and weird stories of the assembly line.

 

Several folks have probably tried such things; likely a few got away with it....but not many, at the plant-level anyway. The execs, on the other hand, could park their car in the exec garage and have changes made...or they could order special production units that were capable of being produced at that facility.