There is a small script printed inside the red cove on the side of this car that reads Fuel Injection. In 1957 that was an extraordinary thing to write on a mass produced American car.
The Corvette nearly did not survive
The first Corvettes were slow. The body was fibreglass and the styling was promising, and underneath sat an unremarkable engine driving through an automatic gearbox, which was not what anyone buying a sports car wanted.
Sales were poor enough that Chevrolet considered dropping it. What saved the car was putting a V8 in it and then, by 1957, offering fuel injection as an option.
Mechanical fuel injection on a road car at that point was rare anywhere in the world and almost unheard of in America. It turned the Corvette from a stylish disappointment into a genuine sports car.
Why the C1 shape still works
Round headlights sitting proud in chrome surrounds, a toothy chrome grille, a long bonnet and a body with a distinct cove scooped into each side behind the front wheel.
That cove is the signature. It was painted in a contrasting colour as an option, which is what you see here with red inside a white body, and it breaks up the flank in a way nothing else on the road was doing.
The shape is all curves with no hard creases, which makes it a real test for tooling. Get one radius wrong and the whole car looks inflated.
The chrome carries this casting
There is a lot of it: the grille with its vertical teeth, the front and rear bumpers, the headlight surrounds, the windscreen frame and the side trim around the cove.
Welly handled it with proper chrome finish rather than silver paint, and kept the trim thin. Thick chrome trim is the commonest way to ruin a fifties car, because the real trim was delicate and moulding it heavy makes the whole body look clumsy.
The wheels here are chrome with fine detail and they actually suit the car, which is worth saying given how often I have complained about Welly wheels on other subjects.
The interior is red and fully visible, with seats and a dashboard, because the top is down.
Fifties sports cars in a collection
Most shelves jump from prewar hot rods to sixties muscle with nothing in between, which leaves out the decade when American manufacturers first tried to build sports cars.
The Corvette is the obvious entry point and it pairs naturally with the Thunderbird, which arrived a couple of years later and took a different approach to the same problem.
Both are cheap in 1:64, both are instantly recognisable, and together they cover a moment that gets skipped.
Two tone coves and how they fail
The contrasting cove is the defining option on this Corvette and it is also the first thing to go wrong on a casting.
The colour has to fill the recess exactly, following a curved boundary that runs around the scoop. Overspray onto the white body is obvious, and a cove that stops short of the trim line looks unfinished.
On a loose example check the boundary on both sides under good light. Then check the chrome trim that frames the cove, because it is thin and it takes the same handling as the body around it.
Buying a loose C1
The windscreen frame is chrome, thin and standing alone on an open car. It is the most fragile part and the one that gets bent in storage.
Then the grille teeth, which are fine vertical bars at the front of the car and take every impact.
Then the Fuel Injection script inside the cove. It is small, printed, and sits at handling height on the side of the car. A C1 without it loses the detail that makes this specific version interesting.
White paint shows scuffing and yellows with age. Look at the bonnet and the rear deck under angled light, and compare the colour against something you know is fresh.
Storing open cars properly
The same advice applies here as to any convertible and it is worth repeating because it is cheap to follow.
Dust settles into an open cabin and does not come out easily, so a red interior on an open shelf goes dull within a year.
The windscreen frame catches on anything it slides past, which is how frames get bent in drawers.
Individual compartments solve both. For cars with delicate chrome like this one, it is the difference between a model that stays sharp and one that slowly degrades.
The short answer
Delicate chrome handled properly, a correctly formed cove with the Fuel Injection script that explains why this year matters, and wheels that suit the car for once. Fragile in the ways all fifties open cars are fragile. One of the better Welly castings I have looked at.
