Rare Corvettes · One of one

Astro II (XP-880)

Long before the C8 finally put the Corvette's engine in the middle, one running prototype proved it could be done. The 1968 Astro II was GM's first true mid-engine Corvette — and the fact that it was built around a cast-off Pontiac transaxle tells you exactly how seriously the corporation was taking the idea.

The 1968 Chevrolet Astro II XP-880 mid-engine Corvette prototype
The Astro II, XP-880 — GM's first working mid-engine Corvette prototype, shown at the 1968 New York Auto Show. Photo: Charles, Port Chester NY (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

The Astro II came out of Chevrolet R&D under Frank Winchell — the same engineer whose rear-engine XP-819 would crash into a wall a few years earlier. This time Winchell and Larry Nies put the engine in the middle: a 427-cubic-inch big-block V8 making 400 horsepower, mounted amidships in a central-backbone chassis with thick, safety-beam-filled doors and a 20-gallon fuel cell tucked into the center of the frame.

The tell-tale detail was the transaxle. Rather than engineer a proper one, the team reached for a two-speed automatic transaxle out of the 1961–63 Pontiac Tempest — a unit already out of production — and mounted the engine backward to make everything fit. It was a lash-up, and everyone knew it; the humble hardware underneath the show-stopping body was a quiet admission that GM wasn't yet ready to commit real money to a mid-engine Corvette.

Astro II at a glance

  • Built: one, shown at the 1968 New York Auto Show
  • Engine: 427 big-block V8, 400 hp, mounted amidships (and backward)
  • Transaxle: a two-speed automatic lifted from the out-of-production Pontiac Tempest
  • Now: preserved at the GM Heritage Center, Sterling Heights, Michigan

However improvised, the Astro II did its job: it lit a fire under the mid-engine Corvette conversation and pushed Zora Arkus-Duntov's own program forward. It's the first entry in a fifty-year saga of mid-engine Corvette prototypes that dazzled auto shows and died in boardrooms — a saga the 2020 C8 finally ended. See the whole lineage in the rare Corvettes collection.