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Click on a Car # to go directly to that Gallery.
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Tubeframe 2 |
| # 77 | # 18 |
| # 4 | # 02 |
| # 6 | # 81 |
| # 13 | |
| # 22 | |
| # 18 |
The Tubeframe Cars
by John Greenwood
We introduced the "winged thing" at Brainerd, MN in 1977. This was our first tube frame race car that we developed over the winter of 1976 and served as the inspiration for the Turbo street car. The "Winged Thing" was an all-aluminum big block with a real working wing and used an automatic transmission. The tube frame car would have done well at its introduction except that one of the tires went down on the first corner and we had some trouble in the pits. We were done. This is the same style of car that Pickett drove through 1978 and 1979, however. The Turbo style street car was the first one where we offered the vented
wheel wells, real wing and 5-link rear suspension. It was going to be another 8 years before GM came up to that level!The full tubeframe cars like the one run by Greg Pickett and John Paul Sr. were probably the best Corvettes up to that point in time. I guess there is an open question as to whether they could be called street-derivatives now that the frame wasn't a factory frame but that was the way that everyone was going at that time, so you just went with it. In effect, we were getting into a whole new
generation of cars that ran from 1977 or 1978 through to the present, really. It was in this time period that we had a lot of help from Bob Riley. He had worked with Protofab for a long time. He had his hand on all those Protofab cars that Chevy brought out of Canada. He also did a full composite car that raced against the Jaguars for a while -- the Intrepid. Bob worked on both the full-frame/coil-over and the tubeframe cars. He was one of the few engineering people who could get down to practical matters in a short period of time.
