First Corvette ever built reportedly found, to be restored

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What may be the very first production Chevrolet Corvette, VIN 001, has recently been tracked down and had its pedigree verified by a marque expert—an expert who now owns the car and is preparing for it a full restoration. Utah-based Corvette researcher Corey Petersen first announced he thought he’d found the car – long presumed by the enthusiast community to have been destroyed during General Motors’ prototype testing – early in 2023, explaining at the time that he sort of stumbled into purchasing the car while simply looking to document the history of the earliest examples of the model.

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Petersen told Hemmings that he was specifically working with fellow Corvette researcher John Amgwert to try to piece together how the first three pre-production Corvette prototypes differed from production models, as well as to document whatever he could on the first dozen or so ’53 Corvettes.

Some six of the first nine cars built were retained by Chevrolet engineering, he found out, with the company aiming to test those early cars to revise and improve the rest of the Corvettes that’d begun rolling off the line. The changes made to those cars took the form of work orders, which Petersen uncovered via GM’s Heritage Center.

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VIN 001, internally designated car 3950, was for the longest time thought to have been destroyed after an intensive bit of such scrutiny, but Petersen also found it was driven by a handful of top GM execs before “Chevrolet let a whole battalion of GM engineers pick it apart to look for various deficiencies that had made it through the rushed development and production process.”

When Petersen combed through the work orders and the 22 changes to 3950 that the engineers suggested, he compared them to the bizarre tweaks he’d seen on another car in the shop of restorer Lloyd Miller, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about 20 years ago; sure enough, they lined up, and so he booked another viewing of the car and gave its East Coast-based owner a call to let him know the Corvette was not, as the owner’d half-suspected, VIN 002, but in fact the first Corvette built. While it wasn’t his intention, eventually Petersen got to talking with the owner about buying the car, and then did.

The expert says his plans are for a full restoration, possibly the last he’ll ever undertake, to bring 3950 to its condition following the 22 engineering changes. Petersen’s research also suggests the three pre-production prototype Corvettes built by Chevrolet were largely turned into show cars, and then disassembled or crushed. In any case, they’ve yet to resurface, which would make VIN 001 the oldest surviving Corvette, too—one we can’t wait to see brought back to its former glory.