Pioneer Spirit - Corvette Magazine #25 June 2006

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Over three seasons in the early '80s, the Corvette made its most significant advances in a generation. Paul Zazarine wonders why almost nobody remembers.

Photographs by the author.

Let's get something straight. Nineteen-eighty through 1982 Corvettes don't stand tall in the legend of America's Sports Car, and the reason is obvious. In terms of raw performance, they're all pretty stony. Even former Corvette chief engineer Dave McLellan, on whose watch these often-forgotten cars were constructed, dismisses the '81 in particular as "...slow as a Mazda Miata."

Yet we've not come to bury these cars but to praise them. First off, raw speed isn't everything—a fact that Corvette fans always conveniently forget until mileage, handling, or build quality guides their ire to another subject. Second, the challenges facing the model in this era, both from outside and inside GM, were so daunting that McClellan and friends weren't just tweaking another new car, they were trying to map out the model's survival. To put it mildly, the Corvettes of the late-'70s and early-'80s lived in interesting times.

Just as Congress had long warned Detroit, emissions, mileage, and safety regs kept growing increasingly tough every year in the 1970s. Politically, the plan had always been to give carmakers a generous decade or more to get where Americans thought that they should be. Nevertheless, GM steadfastly went with the laziest, most desultory path to compliance each year. As a result, foreign marques such as Honda, Porsche, BMW, and Toyota gained technology—and marketshare—every season, while GM saved a few R&D pennies at the cost of alienating once-loyal buyers and suppliers. For example, since GM resented having to certify every new drivetrain it wanted to offer, it refused to hire enough staff to do that job quickly. Engine and gearbox choices plummeted, leaving customers bewildered and suppliers saddled with unused capacity. The corporation also refused to fund serious fuel-injection research even after the need became obvious in the mid-'70s; later, it balked at buying that technology from others who hadn't shirked the responsibility.

This self-defeating attitude didn't leave programs like McClellan's very much room to maneuver. Even bit-players like Datsun and Volvo got full fuel injection by '75, yet at the start of the '80s the Corvette was still struggling to sort out a lower-cost hybrid that was part passive carburetor, part active computer, and all needless compromise.

Needless, mind you, but far from useless.

http://www.corvette-mag.com/art1/art1p1.html

 

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As imperfect as this system was (called "Computer Command Control," it debuted in California for 1980 and everywhere for '81), the carb/computer hybrid did prove how adept GM engineers were at making real headway despite their Board's lousy decisions. CCC cleverly used a more or less standard carburetor, set to run lean all the time, to deliver most of the car's needed fuel. A crude computer then took signals from a simple oxygen sensor and used them to trigger a single injector to add in the balance. While the design couldn't match full fuel injection for performance, CCC did teach the engineers plenty about closed-loop exhaust sampling and the value of faster onboard computers—two concepts that paid giant dividends later on in the 1980s.

While the Corvette's drivetrain and engine-management options were less than ideal in these seasons, the '80 through '82 models generated other ideas that would help shape the car's future resurgence. To aid performance and economy simultaneously, the engineers struggled to take out as much weight as possible. For 1980 about 250 pounds came off from all over the car, including lighter roof, door, and hood panels; a standard aluminum intake manifold in place of the L48's iron unit; and a new aluminum diff case and crossmember.

The latter was a spinoff of Chevy's decision that the unique Corvette differential was too much trouble to keep making in-house. Forced to locate an outside supplier, McClellan's group decided on Dana and specifically requested a new light-alloy case and crossmember. The resulting joint effort taught the Corvette team invaluable lessons about working in stressed aluminum—lessons it soon put to use on the all-new C4—and stood as another example of how to turn corporate lemons into model-specific lemonade.

The weight-loss regimen continued in '81, with thinner window and roof glass; magnesium valve covers; tubular stainless-steel headers in all 50 states; and, most dramatically, a radical new plastic-leaf-spring technology. Traditional steel leaf springs need lots of mass to store energy, even though most of the deflection occurs out at the ends. Jointly developed by Corvette Engineering, GM Manufacturing Development, and GM Inland Division (the same folks behind the '68 GTO Endura front bumper), this new spring used eight pounds of precisely shaped fiberglass and resin rather than of 50-odd pounds of railroad-straight steel. It was soon obvious that every Corvette would be getting these springs front and rear, but to test out the waters, only base-suspension automatics got them in '81 and only at the rear. All future Corvettes would tap this light, corrosion-resistant technology, as would millions of other GM vehicles.

The team also looked hard at the swoopy C3's surprisingly poor aerodynamics. This area had been mildly improved with the bolt-on spoilers offered on '78 Pace Cars and all '79s; for '80, the body was further massaged with new front and rear caps sporting even larger spoilers cast right in. The Cd fell from an abominable 0.50 to a merely weak 0.43—enough improvement to pick up about five percent on the EPA rating. Second- and third-gear torque-convertor clutches also helped automatics get better mileage in '81. The real breakthrough in that area came a year later, with the new 700R4 four-speed for '82. The final year of the series also saw the long-overdue arrival of the modern monolith catalytic convertor—a design at once smaller, lighter, more efficient, and less restrictive than GM's earlier pellet-type systems.

 

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Despite all the technological and political ferment surrounding the cars of the period, with its highly restrictive cat and lack of a high-horse engine option it's easy to see why the 190-bhp '81 is remembered by some as the pokiest Corvette in decades.

But if early-'80s Corvettes did seem a bit lacking in fire, they were also dashingly handsome and increasingly well screwed together. With the exception of the 1953 model—a car that was literally handbuilt on a temporary craft line in Flint—the Corvette's home base had always been the Chevy/GMAD assembly plant at St. Louis, Missouri. In '81, faced with the need to perform a major EPA-mandated upgrade of that facility, GMAD decided to shift the Corvette into an expanded and reconstructed former Chrysler a/c plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky. In the process, the production line would be upgraded with some of the newest and best tooling and robot-assembly systems then offered.

The first Bowling Green-built Corvette came off the line on June 1, 1981. While the machine itself hadn't changed, the uprated assembly tools and a new basecoat/clearcoat enamel paint system immediately raised overall build quality. Corvette production ended at St. Louis in August of '81, and since that time every Corvette has been made in Kentucky. (Of the 40,606 cars built that year, 8995 came from the new Bowling Green plant.)

Our '81 photo car was made relatively early in the factory's debut season, although not in exactly the form you see here. Bowling Green produced most (though not all, as many believe) two-tone '81s. This one was purchased by current owner Charlie Schlau way back in '86, and originally came finished in silver over blue with all the luxe goodies imaginable: leather seats, power everything, cruise, aluminum wheels, and the top AM/FM ETR stereo-cassette player. Charlie fell in love with the car's already classic styling and bought it to experience the pleasure of driving a Corvette while he still could—which wasn't, he thought, going to be much longer.

"I'd watched my mother gradually lose her vision to corneal dystrophy," Charlie explains, "so I knew what to expect." A disorder that destroys the transparency of the eyes' outer layer, corneal dystrophy is primarily an inherited condition: The Schlaus had the genes, and Charlie was one of the unlucky ones.

He enjoyed his Corvette until '89, when his advancing condition meant he could no longer see well enough to safely keep driving. Charlie still kept the car, though, which later proved happily prescient. In '99, after undergoing his second corneal-transplant surgery, Charlie's vision was so well restored he could once again take to the road.

Eager to refurbish his Corvette in celebration, Charlie decided he liked car's two-tone finish but wanted to do something to it just a bit out of the ordinary. Instead of maintaining the original silver/blue scheme he inverted the combination—a small change with major aesthetic impact. Most people who see Charlie's '81 can't figure out why it's different, they just know they like how it looks.

In 2003 Charlie and his wife Patricia retired and moved to Apollo Beach, Florida. "We decided to drive the Corvette down from New York rather than trust someone to ship it," he says. At first Patricia was reticent about driving the car herself, but by the time the couple reached Bowling Green (to tour their car's birthplace and visit the National Corvette Museum), she had to pried off the wheel.

Charlie's Corvette has fewer than 66,000 miles on it, but even so he's preparing to pull out the original L81 350 and install a more powerful crate motor. That move might not be NCRS-approved, he agrees, but "...it would add to my driving pleasure; you've got to keep up with the times."

 

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Dwayne

I am copying this one to the L81 Forum

Bud

 

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Boy, that was a good read!

Bud - Save the pictures, I think they change every month.

 

[82ColEd]

Good read, thanks for sharing Dwayne..


-Stefan