People · Bill Mitchell · Chapter 4 of 6

Split Decision

GM Styling — 1961–1962

The production Corvette that grows out of Mitchell's Stingray Racer and the Mako Shark studies is, by any measure, his masterpiece: a fastback coupe with hidden headlamps and a single unbroken crease that runs the entire length of the body — up the hood, across the roof, down the rear deck — as clean and continuous a line as anything his studio has ever drawn. There is exactly one problem, and Mitchell refuses to see it as a problem at all. Where that crease crosses the rear window, he wants it to keep going: a body-colored spine splitting the glass cleanly in two.

Zora Arkus-Duntov looks at the same drawing and sees something else entirely — a car that will put a fixed steel bar directly in the driver's rearward sightline, on top of the blind spot the fastback's thick C-pillar already creates. For an engineer who has spent a decade insisting the Corvette should be a real driver's car and not just a beautiful one, this is not a minor styling quibble. It's a safety defect wearing a chrome trim strip.

Mitchell wanted one perfect, unbroken line. Duntov wanted to see what was behind him. Neither man was inclined to lose the argument quietly.

What follows has become one of the most retold confrontations in Corvette history, and the retellings agree on the essential shape of it even when they disagree on the exact words: two of the most stubborn men at General Motors, shouting across the roof of a clay model, neither willing to concede an inch. Mitchell holds that the design is the split window — remove it and you've removed the idea itself. Duntov holds that a sports car a driver can't see out of has failed at the one job that matters most. The fight goes over both their heads to be settled by people with the authority to overrule either of them.

History's verdict turns out to be stranger than either man could have predicted at the time. Mitchell lost the argument for 1964 onward. But the one model year he won outright became a legend precisely because it only existed for one year — Duntov's practical objection accidentally manufactured Mitchell's rarest, most desired masterpiece. Both men, in a sense, were right. Neither would have enjoyed hearing it put that way.

Mitchell isn't finished with sea creatures, either. Even as the split-window argument plays out, he's already staring at a mounted shortfin mako shark in his studio, working out what comes after the Sting Ray.