Corvette Grand Sport

Recreating a rare Corvette racer

Steve Temple / autoMedia.com

Corvette enthusiasts already know the story of the Grand Sport, but it's worth retelling. Back in the Sixties, the Ford-powered Shelby Cobra was just beginning to dominate road-course racing. In retaliation, GM engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov took the then-new Corvette Sting Ray and whacked 1,000 pounds off the car, throwing everything that didn't contribute to speed into the dumpster. He employed a tubular chassis with aluminum reinforcements, and was rewarded with the Grand Sport, a Corvette that quickly proved to be a Mongoose capable of eating a Cobra—alive. Even though there were plans for 100 more Grand Sports, GM management scrapped the program, and the five originals disappeared from the track, melting into private hands.

Considering the Grand Sport's short but illustrious motorsport history, getting your hands on one is essentially an exercise in futility. Even if one of these ultra-rare racers ever did come on the market, someone with a lot more money might quickly outbid you. 

Grand Sports weren't always so pricey. Dick Guldstrand, sharing one of those painful, "If I only knew" anecdotes, had a clapped-out roller back in 1967, which he'd left in the alley behind his shop. He ended up selling it for—get this—$5,000.

Of course, back then you could buy a small house for about that, so it might as well have been a multi-million-dollar car. At least that's how Larry Weiner felt about it, a minimum-wage, 17-year-old at the time. But he had a lust for everything automotive that would eventually lead him to found Performance West Group and become a prominent builder of show cars for the major auto manufacturers. But he never forgot the Grand Sport he could never afford, so he decided to create one himself. After all, if he couldn't buy one, then why not build one from scratch? Well, maybe not totally from the ground up, since Mid America Corvette entered the picture with a Grand Sport conversion called the GS-2.

Based on original blueprints for the chassis, Mid America's Jeff Leach produced a jig, along with molds to create the fiberglass body parts unique to the vehicle. It uses the center tub from the '63-'67 model years, so the finished vehicle is actually a modified Corvette with the original title. Pricing of the GS-2 starts at $5,500 for the components (ironically enough, more than what Guldstrand sold his original for!). A rolling chassis goes for $35,000, and turn-keys cost a minimum of $80,000, although Leach says $100,000 is a more typical figure. Still, that's only a fraction of the price of what an original Grand Sport would sell for.

In 1989, Weiner sold his 308 Ferrari to help pay for a a Mid America GS-2 and his ship set sail. He knew the project wouldn't be a precise reproduction, however. "My goal was not to end up with an exact clone," explains Weiner, "but a vehicle that took advantage of technology by integrating newer Corvette components. And it also had to be street legal." After obtaining a tube chassis from Mid America, it took Weiner two years to find a clean Corvette body tub, discovered at the Bloomington Gold Corvette Show. He shipped the central structure to the factory in Milan, Illinois, and Leach began constructing the body.

"Mid America had almost all the parts to build the Grand Sport body," Weiner recalls, "And the rest I secured from Corvette suppliers. I'd sit up at night making lists of all the parts I'd need. This was my hobby, my relaxation," he laughs, realizing his Grand Sport project took on the dimensions of an obsession.