People · Bill Mitchell · Chapter 6 of 6

Outlasting the Ban

GM Styling — the 1970s

Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, as Zora Arkus-Duntov's engineering team pushes the XP-882 mid-engine prototypes through one boardroom rejection after another, Mitchell's studio keeps producing the visual case for the same idea from the styling side — a related show car called the Manta Ray, reworked from Mako Shark II bones, among others. Duntov built the argument in aluminum and drivetrain layout; Mitchell kept building the argument in sculpture. Both men are, by this point in their careers, fighting the same institutional caution from different departments — the identical position Mitchell himself once occupied with the Stingray Racer, except now he's the one running a whole division instead of hiding a chassis in a back room.

The two men's most famous fights — the split window, the Coke-bottle fenders — were always, underneath the shouting, disagreements between two people who agreed on the fundamentals: that the Corvette should be daring, that Detroit's usual caution was the real enemy, and that a car built by committee was a car not worth building. On the question of the mid-engine layout, for once, they were simply on the same side, pushing the same boulder up the same Fourteenth Floor hill.

Two retirements, two years apart

  • January 1, 1975 — Zora Arkus-Duntov retires at GM's mandatory age; the mid-engine Aerovette program he championed is still alive, still unbuilt. Read the full mid-engine chapter.
  • July 1977 — Mitchell steps down himself, shortly after his own 65th birthday, having kept pushing for the mid-engine Corvette for more than two years after his old sparring partner left the building.
  • Without either man's institutional weight behind it, new chief engineer Dave McLellan cancels the Aerovette program for good. The front-engine C4 arrives in 1984.

After GM, Mitchell doesn't fully retire so much as go independent — running William L. Mitchell Design, a private consultancy, from 1977 until 1984, still sketching, still consulting, still unmistakably himself. He dies of heart failure on September 12, 1988, at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, at seventy-six.

Earl taught him that a car's shape was worth fighting for. Duntov taught him, the hard way, that the fight was worth having even when he lost.

Between them, Bill Mitchell and Zora Arkus-Duntov ran the Corvette program for a combined thirty-six years, disagreeing loudly and often, and somehow never actually working against each other's larger purpose. Mitchell's fingerprints are on the two Corvette shapes most collectors still chase hardest today — the 1963 split-window coupe and the entire flared, Coke-bottle run of the C3 — and on a studio culture, Studio X above all, that proved a design department could out-maneuver corporate caution just as effectively as an engineering department could. He inherited a studio from Harley Earl. He left it having reshaped the Corvette twice over, and having spent it, unhesitatingly, on a car he never stopped believing deserved the fight.