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Written by Craig Jamieson
No. Go back. Look at the picture again. We"ll wait.There, that"s more like it, isn"t it? This is a 1957 Corvette in our minds, the best-looking to ever emerge from Chevrolet. And that"s not just an idle remark, either; the 1956-57 Corvette is deserving of its place in automotive royalty on looks alone. And, in 1957, Corvettes upgraded from a three-speed to a four-speed manual gearbox and gained fuel injection. As quaint as they seem now, they were pretty serious performance yardsticks back in the Fifties. To further the performance potential, this particular Corvette comes with the vaunted 579E option, which, of course, you"ll recognise instantly as the cold-air induction kit for its 283 cubic inch (4.6-litre) V8. As anyone who"s old enough to start a sentence with, "Back in my day" will tell you, engine intakes used to be very simple things a big, circular air filter would sit on top of a carburettor (or multiple carburettors, if you were really fancy), with a small pipe poking out into the engine bay. The problem with this idea is that the air under the bonnet gets rather hot, and hot air is not as dense as cold air. That means there are fewer air particles in any given volume of air, which means an inefficient burn and less power. So, the 579E cold air intake fitted to just 43 of the 6,000-odd Corvettes that Chevy built in 1957 meant that the newly fuel-injected V8 could deliver more than 280bhp from 4.6 litres, in a time before Sputnik. Coincidentally enough, Sputnik was launched on October 4th, 1957 after the fuel-injected Chevy Corvette, but some four months before the Americans launched the Explorer 1 satellite.
Date written: 1 Nov 2017
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 9782
No. Go back. Look at the picture again. We"ll wait.There, that"s more like it, isn"t it? This is a 1957 Corvette in our minds, the best-looking to ever emerge from Chevrolet. And that"s not just an idle remark, either; the 1956-57 Corvette is deserving of its place in automotive royalty on looks alone. And, in 1957, Corvettes upgraded from a three-speed to a four-speed manual gearbox and gained fuel injection. As quaint as they seem now, they were pretty serious performance yardsticks back in the Fifties. To further the performance potential, this particular Corvette comes with the vaunted 579E option, which, of course, you"ll recognise instantly as the cold-air induction kit for its 283 cubic inch (4.6-litre) V8. As anyone who"s old enough to start a sentence with, "Back in my day" will tell you, engine intakes used to be very simple things a big, circular air filter would sit on top of a carburettor (or multiple carburettors, if you were really fancy), with a small pipe poking out into the engine bay. The problem with this idea is that the air under the bonnet gets rather hot, and hot air is not as dense as cold air. That means there are fewer air particles in any given volume of air, which means an inefficient burn and less power. So, the 579E cold air intake fitted to just 43 of the 6,000-odd Corvettes that Chevy built in 1957 meant that the newly fuel-injected V8 could deliver more than 280bhp from 4.6 litres, in a time before Sputnik. Coincidentally enough, Sputnik was launched on October 4th, 1957 after the fuel-injected Chevy Corvette, but some four months before the Americans launched the Explorer 1 satellite.
Date written: 1 Nov 2017
More of this article on the Top gear website
ID: 9782
