The mid-engined Corvette was 60 years in the making, now we’ve driven it

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  Chevrolet has designed plenty of mid-engined Corvettes over the past six decades, but this is the first time it's put one into production. [credit: Chevrolet ]

Predicting the arrival of a mid-engined Corvette has been a perennial bench-racing sport in the auto news game for decades. The first of the Chevrolet research cars that placed an engine behind the driver goes back to 1960, conceived by the first chief engineer of the Corvette, Zora Arkus-Duntov. Now, after thinking about it very, very long and very, very hard, Chevrolet starts building production mid-engined Corvettes this year, some 60 years after that first research vehicle.

With all that pent-up anticipation, could the new $59,995 Corvette actually be both brilliant and actually shy of the mark? We tested several with different suspensions on the road and the track around Spring Mountain Raceway in Nevada to glean the truth.

The inescapable reality of designing a mid-engine layout in the sports car segment is that, well, the Italians basically own it. But they didn't pioneer it. Post-WWII, Porsche built sports-racing 550 Spyders, RSKs and 904s, but Ferrari and Lamborghini built street cars placing engines behind drivers' heads in earnest by the 1960s.

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