Harley Earl engineered America’s first modern production sports car. Pure and simple, the following 1951 magazine article fleshes out many historical facts on this one-of-a-kind "300 HP Super Sportster." Imagine, at the time, none of Detroit's big auto makers were producing any two-seated sports cars! Naturally, this visionary wanted the world's largest car brand, Chevrolet, to kick off his novel idea! 

As you can now see, Harley Earl's muse for the original Corvette was the Le Sabre sportster and the bottom line is that this innovator didn't brag about every one of his accomplishments, most of which were "Engineering Milestones"  during far better days in America's car capital than what's going on there today. From the tire treads up, to the all-inclusive body Corvette engineering and complex development side of designing the envelope of this car, everything came to light inside the Styling Section of GM that Earl also originally created.

Are you perhaps wondering why the Detroit News didn't write that Harley Earl, "created the Corvette for Chevrolet" inside this obituary? Perhaps they ran out of room; for after all, it's not easy writing about everything this man did in a limited amount of copy space. Other obits in major newspapers and magazines got it right though. 

15 years after this sports car was originally created in 1953, Chevrolet came up with the corporate "chief engineer of Corvette" position in 1968 and Zora Arkus-Duntov filled the space at 54 years old! Truth be told, if Harley Earl's engineering might hadn't been so large to begin with in Detroit, this dream car would certainly never have been built and/or been so enormously successful going into the 1960s. Regardless of all the spin put on Corvette history by the legions of Chevy PR guys and traditional auto engineers like Duntov, they all knew in the long run history would always recognize the real winning founder behind this bedrock American icon: Harley Earl. (Don't take things out of context here, we deeply appreciate Zora's role in Corvette history, but simply put he was not the driving force behind this wonderful automobile's long success.)

The shinning star behind Corvette's first decade of success (1953 to 1963) was Earl and afterwards this car, like all GM's line up of vehicles over the last forty odd years came forth in a volatile wake within this company. The outcome is GM will most likely go bankrupt later on in 2009. Even today, Harley Earl's Corvette remains the most distinctive, best built and most desirable car GM designs, engineers and volume produces.