Description
Very rare beautiful 1963 blue Chevrolet Corvette Split Window in excellent condition. One of the most sought-after classics!
with 10, 546 cars produced , numbers Matching 327C. I. V8 - 4-Speed Manual Transmission - Power Steering - Power Brakes - new carets set with the car - Silver Blue - Dark Blue Interior
At the center of the 1963 Corvette coupe's legacy, however, is the car's split-window back glass design. Mitchell's styling vocabulary and his influence within the Chevrolet styling studio was partly an outgrowth of his curiosity with marine life; sea creatures like the stingray and mako shark had long influenced Mitchell's work, and many anatomical features like gills, wings, tails, and spines would surface in his work. For the 1963 split-window Corvette, the folded crease of the tumblehome represented a spine-like design element that divided the back glass into two halves, allowing this spine element to run uninterrupted from the roof to the rear deck.
How Mitchell expressed this design cue to Shinoda isn't known exactly, but one story infers that the split-window idea was actually "found" by GM styling exec David Holls at the 1959 Michigan State Fair. A rare German 1937 Adler Trumpf Rennlimousine was spotted, and its owner was asked to bring the car to the GM Tech Center for photography (see the entire car in the gallery). While the car bore zero resemblance to the second-generation Corvette, its rear greenhouse and split rear back glass seemed to be just what Mitchell had been envisioning for the Corvette. While the Corvette's design was clearly inspired by marine life themes, it was the split-window motif that allowed the "spine" theme to come to full fruition.
Ironically, while the engineering, performance, and styling of the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray was well-received by the public, the split-window back glass was not. The center pillar blocked outward visibility to the rear and quickly became a safety concern. In many instances, owners would remove the two bisected panes and replace them with a single window. Chevy dealerships would even replace the split windows with a single backglass—a cardinal sin in today's Corvette collector environment. After a single year of production, the split rear-window design was shelved for a single back glass in 1964, and the split-window Corvette of 1963 became one of the most notorious (and beloved!) asterisks in automotive history
