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CORVETTE TODAY #216 - Meet Corvette Legend, Don Runkle
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Jul 12, 2025
Don Runkle may not be a household name right now in the world of Corvette, but he sure was when the C4 was launching! Don sits down with your CORVETTE TODAY host, Steve Garrett, to talk about his career. Runkle was the Chief Engineer for Chevrolet, he worked with Zora Arkus Duntov, he's been at the head of many companies, including Delphi. Don tells the story of how Corvette engineers got the OK for the C4 Corvette along with the story of how we didn't have a 1983 Corvette! He also tells the story of what happened when Corvette was supposed to go to 6 cylinders or diesel. Plus, Don was nominated for the Corvette Hall of Fame thi year! Don was one of the key figures in Corvette history that kept the Corvette flame burning bright! You'll truly enjoy this episode of CORVETTE TODAY!
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[Music] Welcome to Corvette Today, the show that
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talks about everything Corvette with your host Steve Garrett, lifetime member of the National Corvette Museum,
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president of the Corvette Club of Kansas City, Missouri, and radio disc jockey at the number one radio station in Kansas
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City for over 45 years. Here's Steve Garrett.
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Thanks for listening and watching Corvette Today, the show that talks about everything Corvette and the only
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current podcast dedicated to Corvette. I'm your host, Steve Garrett. I appreciate you tuning in. Corvette Today
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is brought to you by Wheelcraft. Want to dress up your Corvette with bright chrome or black chrome wheels? Visit
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to find out more. Chevrolet together. Let's drive. And a shout out to Canadian
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Corvette Forum and Corvette Forum. Welcoming Corvette enthusiasts from around the world. My guest on today's
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show is the former GM executive who helped shape Corvette into what it is today. He's brought over five decades of
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executive leadership across many industries and functions. and he did much of Corvette's product planning,
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too, which includes getting approval for the C4 Corvette and the ZR1. His name is
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Don Wrl. Don, welcome to Corvette today, my friend. Well, Steve, looking forward to the
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interview. Enjoyed your show all the time. You do a great job. The Corvette fans are lucky to have you. Thank you, sir. You are too kind. I
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appreciate all the kudos. Don, first off, I usually do this with my guests. Tell me about your upbringing. Tell me
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where you grew up. Did you have any siblings? And did you come from a car family? Well, it's interesting. I had a totally
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unimpressive upbringing. I grew up in sort of central Pennsylvania in a town that had about 50 people in it called
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Pike Town. Every day I walked across the Appalachian Trail. Not many of your guests will be able to make the claim
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that I started my education in a one room schoolhouse with outdoor John's.
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Wow. You can tell I was a late birth in my family. My dad unfortunately died when I
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was think about 11 years old. And my brother, who actually fought in World War II, he was substantially older from
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my dad's first marriage. So he was like 25 years older than me. And and he basically from that time on watched over
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and took me hunting and shooting guns and lots of stuff like that and a lot of car stuff. So in my early days, I
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tinkered with bikes and lawnmowers and motorcycles. Lots of mechanical tinkering. sort of had that mechanical
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aptitude and so that's how it started and from there I you know went on to be much more interested in cars and so
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forth and somehow stumbled into a job at General Motors and did lots of good stuff and the rest is history. Right.
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Right. Don, tell me about the time when you figured out you were a real car person. I would say when my brother and I he
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said hey let's build a hot rod. So we found a 29 Model A which was in bushell
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baskets. Okay. who bought it for 25 bucks, put it in his pickup truck and brought it to the shop. And you know,
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I'm 12 years old or 11 years old. I used to ride my bike out to his garage, which was about a half hour bike ride. And so
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we began to make it into a real hot rod. You know, we zed the frame and put a suicide front end and a 32 grill and put
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a Ford small block engine in it and three two barrel strong carburetors and all that good stuff. So that was sort of
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the car side of it. Then I bought a 33 Cabriolet and put a Hemi in it. When I turned 16, I bought a TR2 right-hand
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drive by my dad's sports car and drove it in college. Oo. The only reason girls would go out with
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me in college was because when I drove it, all their girlfriends thought they were driving since mine was right-hand
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drive. So, I thought it was me. But, uh,
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that's awesome. So, when did Corvettes come into your realm? And was Corvette always the car for you? I would say it
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came into me. I always admired it, but you know, I had a TR2, then we had a Ford hot rod, then I had a 58
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Volkswagen, which is what I had when I went off to the university. So then when I actually went into General Motors,
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which was December 16th, 1968, a century ago, that year, I bought a 1970, a brand
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new Corvette. I remember Brans Hatch Green with Saddle Interior 327.
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in a day when you got employee discounts there and you could actually sell it a year or two later and make a little
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money on it. Then two years later after I was at GM, I ended up in the company car program and so then I was out of
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vets for a while because I went into a different program there with them. But then I'd say when I ended up later on in
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Chevrolet planning, Corvette was one of my projects that I kept under my own toutelage instead of the rest of the
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Chevrolet product line. So it sort of entered the day where I could start to have some influence or some input into
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that. That sounds good. Now talk about your college career. Where did you go to school and what did you study?
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My family, none of them graduated from even high school. They were hourly people. My dad was a well driller. My
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mom was a seamstress. We had zero money. And so I didn't have any money and didn't know what college was until
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frankly around 11th grade. One of my teachers said, "Where are you going to college?" I said, "What's college?" But
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anyway, since I had no money, I ended up, he suggested, look at co-op schools. So, there's only about three or four
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around the nation, and I looked at a few of them. And so, one was in Philadelphia, Drexel University. And so,
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I joined them. In a co-op school, six months of the year in general, you can have a real job. You're not waiting on
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tables. Nothing wrong with waiting on tables, but you had a real engineering related job. I went into mechanical
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engineering, and you made damn good money. I could basically make the tuition with my six months there. Then
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you go back and go to school for six months. Takes you five years. My first job was at Kodak in Rochester, New York,
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and I was sort of a time studier and I wrote a little program for them, a computer program that helped them
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estimate how long it takes to build film processing machines. The next year I went to Ford in Dearbornne again in a
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computer science sort of department there and nearby University of Michigan was there. So I went down just to see
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what that was all about. When I walked there, I said, "Wow, this is where I want to go to school." big university.
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The difference between Drexel and University of Michigan is the books that we read in Drexel were written by the
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professors at Michigan. So, there you go. So, anyway, so then I transferred to
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Michigan that following year with a scholarship and got a BSME there. Then after joining GM there in ' 68, then I
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picked up a masters in mechanical engineering. A couple years later than that when I was at Chevy planning GM
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sent me to MIT for an MBA on their Sloan Fellows program which is a very special
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international class of just 53 students and we did our MBA in one year. You stuff two-year MBA into one year.
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Man, Steve, it changed my outlook on where I might go in my career. Up until then, I'm just working on stuff and
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getting along. But that changed my mind, so to speak. That's amazing. All right, so you work for Kodak. You worked for Ford for a
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while. Tell me how you got your job at General Motors, Don. Well, it's interesting at the University
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of Michigan, my advisor there, everybody had an adviser assigned to him, was Professor David Cole. So, David Cole's
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father was the famous president of General Motors, Ed Cole. Oh. And he was, as you recall, the developer
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of the Chevy Small Block, right? And he had a very special relationship with Duntoff and also a fellow named
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Clare McKen. Claire was number two at the GM design staff. Quite frankly, he
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was head of all Chevy design. And think of this, from 54 through 1965. Think of
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the cars through there, right? Yeah. The 55 Chevy, the 57 Chevy, the 58, the
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50, all those. Yeah. And then he went on to become head of Opal Design. Well, I ended up getting
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married to his daughter. No kidding. She was an artist. She was at Michigan. That's where I met her. And that
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marriage lasted 20 years. and two children's twins. But that's how I got in there was Dave Cole heard near the
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end of my bachelor's program at Michigan. You know, you're interviewing and so forth, right? And he heard that I accepted a job at
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Standard Oil California. Huh. Stupid me. I accepted it because it was the highest offer. In those times, there
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was lots of jobs for people with bachelors from University of Michigan. So, he heard about this. He called me
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into his office and just raised hell. and he said, "Brunk, you are a car guy.
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You're not an oil guy. So, I want you to go talk to a upandcomer at General
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Motors, a fellow named Lloyd Royce, who eventually became GM's president. And as
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you know, Mark Royce is the current president of General Motors, his son." Now, Mark was five years old. So, Lloyd
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invited me over to his house, you know, and Marcy and his wife was there and really put the arm on me and convinced
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me to call up Standard Oil and say, "I'm not coming." And I switched over and went to work at Chevrolet Engineering
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December of ' 68. Wow. And I remember I think Mark was five or six years old at the time. And I
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remember a couple years later his dad Lloyd says, "Mark, what do you want to do when you grow up?" He says, "Dad, I
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want to have Mr. Uncle's job. That's a fantastic story, Don.
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That's great. I tell you what, buddy. Let's take our first break. When we come back in segment two, we'll talk about your time
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I'm your host Steve Garrett. With me is Don Rles, a former GM executive with some great stories. In segment number
15:30
two, we're going to talk about Don's time at General Motors. Don, when you first got to GM after that arm twisting
15:37
there at the big guy's house, what was your first job when you got to General Motors and then the other ones
15:43
thereafter? Well, as I said, Lloyd hired me and was my mentor then for seems like life. He stuck me into a role in their
15:51
advanced computer systems area. And I started writing computer programs to
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simulate barrier crashes. As you know, to qualify for cars got to run into the
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barrier and there's a steering column penetration, all kinds of stuff you got to pass, right? Well, I with another researcher in
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research developed a program to simulate that on a computer. So I ended up crashing several thousand vehicles on
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the computer. So that was the first one. For a couple years I probably wrote, you know, 5,000
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computer programs inside of that thing because that was a very sophisticated analysis program and just what a
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mechanical engineer ought to be working on. Sure. Then following that, Royce opened a lot of doors for me. He was a mover and so
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he moved every few years and quite frankly about every two years unexpected
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he'd call me up and say, "Hey, I got a new spot for you. It just became one job after another." And after being on a job
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for about two years, I could always count on him moving me from a job that I was just getting comfortable with and
16:52
knowing something about to a job that I had no clue what it was all about. He took me from being chief engineer
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Camaro. He says, "Hey, tomorrow you're going to show up and I run Buick engines." I said, "Lloyd, I'm sort of a
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hack at engines, you know." He said, "You'll figure it out." That's amazing. Now, tell me the story
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about how you got to start working on Corvette then. Yeah. So, one of the roles was in the Chevrolet planning. That's where I went
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to MIT out of there. When I came back, I went through the Vega program. I was chief engineer Camaro and a bunch of
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other stuff. But when I was in product planning and came back from Sloan, they made me head of Chevrolet product
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planning. There was a passenger car side, there was a truck side and a manufacturing side. As part of that, I
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had all the Chevrolet car platforms as a planning standpoint, but I kept Corvette
17:38
to myself, so to speak. I always had a fascination with it and always liked racing and things like that. And so I
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kept it to myself. And then after selling what we call the 84C4 program to
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the GM product policy group that was the top level group of the chairman and the CEO ours I always kept my fingers in the
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bet for rest of the my time at General Motors in terms of concept bets midenes
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and all kinds of different approaches to that always with the engineering department. Dave Mlen and I became great
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friends to this day. He's the guy that replaced Dunto. When I was chief engineer at Camaro for a short time
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there right near Dunto's end, I shared a three office suite with Dunto. So Wow. Nice.
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So I really go back there. That's awesome. So it was in that area. So with all the racing Daytona lemons, the GTO
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Corvettes, the showroom stock program, the ZR1 came up with a one we did with Lotus, Tony Rudd, and that gang. So, I
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always kept my fingers in that stuff, but it all started as part of Chevrolet planning and started with getting the C4
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program approved. That's really cool. Now, you mentioned you were chief engineer for Camaro, but at 39 years old, Don, you were already
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the chief engineer of Chevrolet overall. Wow, that's amazing. And then you were
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GM's vice president of advanced engineering and the director of advanced vehicle engineering as well, weren't
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you? Yeah, that's right. Like I said, I could probably plot those all out about every two years. It was a different role, but
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my first chief engineer role was on the Camaro. Royce moved me in there and we did the 82 Camaro, which won car of the
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year that year. Then on from that was some of the other things. Then I ended up back as chief engineer of Chevrolet
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during the big reorganization of General Motors and then moved on to advanced vehicle engineering and then I became
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vice president of General Motors in charge of advanced engineering. And I like to always brag that I was that in
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those days, it's much different these days. I was the third youngest vice president ever. John Delorean was number
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one at 40. John Beltz was number two at 41. And I was number three at 42.
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That's amazing. Congratulations, my friend. That's awesome. Now I think you can become a vice
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president when you're 22 years old over there. But in those days to be a vice president was
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a big deal. You know, you're in the top. I think it still is to be honest with you. I think it is. At least to me it
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is. It's a good job. It is. Now, you came to Corvette at a very monumental time, as we talked
20:02
about. You were part of the C4 launch. We lost an infamous year there in 1983,
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didn't we? That's right. Yeah. We started working. It took forever in terms of years to get the C4 up and running. The Corvette's
20:15
volume had fallen off precipitously. There was even some rumor that, okay, we might drop the Corvette in those days.
20:21
Dave Mlone had already taken over from Dunto off on the Corvette program. And so it was just time to do a nuclear vet.
20:29
So we worked on this program for years, the planning of it and so forth. And to Dave Mlen's credit, he continued to push
20:37
to move the vet to simply a different level. The way I like to put it, to be able to run with the big boys, the
20:44
Ferraris and Porsches and all those guys, and not ever have to Corvette for many years always had to apologize for
20:51
something. Right. Right. it had a live rear axle or it didn't have this or it didn't have that. To Dave's credit, and
20:58
I was solidly behind him from a planning standpoint, he said, "Let's do a bet that we don't have to make any apologies
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for. I don't know if we're going to be the fastest car out there, but we're going to be able to run with all of the
21:10
fastest cars." And I thought that was a great way to go. Yeah, definitely. And the C4 represented
21:15
a huge upgrade in technology, didn't it? Yeah, that's right. It was a huge task.
21:20
when I went to the product policy group and again this is the top brass the chairman sitting there the CEO and so
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forth and I'm walking in there to make the presentation okay and cheerleaders you know Mlen and these guys are all
21:32
there in the program I went in and presented a slideshow of the history of
21:38
Corvette and what it meant to General Motors and quite frankly I shamed them into approving this. I said, "Ladies and
21:46
gentlemen, it would be a damn shame if this were the group that decided to not move the Corvette to the next level."
21:53
Yep. And the slideshow had all these old 53 vet things and concepts and all the
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great great history racing and you name it. And Dave put together the engineering behind the change because
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I'm going into a group that normally only approves program if there's a cost reduction in the program. Okay.
22:12
Yeah. I'm going in asking and usually it's like can you save 25 cents on this
22:17
and 30 cents on this. So, can you save $32 on this new car program? I'm going
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in asking for like a $1,000 cost increase cuz we went with aluminum this
22:28
and that. Stiffened the body a lot, the aerodynamics in there, the concealed headlights, all the things that went
22:34
into moving this vet because we wanted to move it to a different level in the market. And we knew there was some risk
22:40
there because Corvette customers, as you know, are very loyal to that thing and they're very protective, the Corvette.
22:46
Oh, yeah. This notion of, okay, can we move this because we knew a price was increase was going to be there. But then we weren't
22:53
going to make any apologies for this car out there. It was going to run with the big boys. That was the thing. So, there
22:59
was a lot of tap dancing on my part. I came up with the idea. I said, "Let's reveal the history because some of these
23:05
people might not know it, but the key guys do." The chairman knows the history. The president knows the history. The head of engineering knows
23:11
the history. We'll shame him into approving this thing. Hey, that worked, didn't it? It worked
23:18
because about halfway through the pitch, I remember I think it was Pets. He says, "Run, sit down. It's approved."
23:25
That's awesome. That's another great story. But then we had to move. We had to skip the year because we were so far late in
23:32
that there was no real sense to do an 83. We said, "Okay, don't fool around with an 83. just will use up our
23:38
resources and it doesn't matter. Some cars it's important to have model years. The bet almost stands on its own. It's
23:45
its own brand, so to speak. Definitely. That's an awesome story. Well, buddy, let's take our final break.
23:50
When we get back, we're going to talk in segment three about the nuts and bolts of the C4 Corvette. That's coming up
23:56
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This is the Corvette Today podcast with Steve Garrett. Thanks once again for
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listening and watching Corvette Today, the show that talks about everything Corvette. Corvette Today is brought to
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you by Wheelcraft. You want your Corvette looking its best, right? Well, dress it up with bright chrome or black
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833-639-4231. I'm your host Steve Garrett. With me is
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Don Wrl. We are talking about the C4 Corvette. In this final segment, we're going to talk more about that. Don,
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outline for me all the advances that the C4 generation brought to Corvette. Well,
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I cannot possibly outline all of them, but with Mlen's expertise and one of the terrific engineers, it couldn't have
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been a better choice after Dunto to head up the Corvette program. There was an advanced IRS system that was put in
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there. Obviously, did all the forged aluminum suspension components in the front SLA front suspension and so forth.
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A thing that I hated was the skip shift on the car. If you'll remember, we went from first gear to fourth gear,
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right? unless you cut that little wire that we displayed underneath the console that says do not cut. So the skip shift
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was there basically to beat the EPA's gas guzzler stuff. Dave and his gang came up with that. Russ did a crossfire.
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I said, "Russ, are you sure you want to call this Crossfire?" But anyway, Crossfire injection tune intake engine.
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So it was a good innovation. It fit the character of the car. Low profile and so forth. Obviously the arrow my good
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friend Jerry Palmer did the design of the car just did a remarkable job and had such a great relationship with
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engineering. Sometimes design and engineering don't get along but that was a great team. Mlen's engineering enabled
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some of the arrow things that he could put into that to get the wind cheating arrow. Yeah. Obviously a dramatic stiffening of the
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chassis. The Corvette was not terrific in that category. So that was some of the stuff. I didn't particularly like
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it, but the instrument panel, you know, with the liquid crystal displays and so forth, that was one of the things I
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would have done differently, but Mlullen was all geeked up about it, so we did it that way. There you go. Yeah, that works.
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So, those are some of the things that were in the product. Obviously, the concealed headlights and the overall
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appearance of it was just a dramatic change from before. And to this day, I still think it's one of the more
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beautiful vets that were out there. I agree, buddy. That's for sure. Now, we alluded to this in the second segment,
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Don, but tell me more of the inside the backstory about the famous we missed the year of 1983.
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Yeah, it took a long time. There was some issues in and around bigger picture stuff for the Corvette was under a bit
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of pressure as to whether it should continue or not and so forth because, you know, General Motors here building
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what 10 million vehicles or something like that. Who the hell needs this 20,000 unit that takes a lot of
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resources and so forth. So, there was that going on. So it took us a longer time than normal and this was a big
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change because as you know we moved from the C3 to the C4 was probably the biggest change we had done. It just took
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a long time to get the engineering organized to get the pitch presentation cleaned up so that we'd get sold because
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we're going in for a fairly substantial cost increase. And so we frankly just got late. We sat around and I don't know
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where the idea came from but says why don't we just skip the damn 1983 and just go right to 84. the Corvette
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crowds. We don't sit around very long to make a decision, you know. So,
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so it was done. That's funny. That's awesome. Now, I even found out that there was even talk
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about making the Corvette a V6 or a diesel at one time and you stopped that and I have to say thank you for stopping
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that. Well, I'm not sure I'm the only guy that stopped that, but we know that Lloyd Royce stepped in there and Bob Stmple
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and myself and obviously Dave and we had run quite a few V6 bets in Prototypes.
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Mlone had them running turbos and so forth. And some of the ones we did with the higher performance V8 turbos and that
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actually led to now since deceased Reeves Callaway who became a very good friend of mine as we sort of turned over
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the twin turbo Corvette to Ree because our view was that GM's never going to approve something with that much
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horsepower. So Ree, why don't you do this? That's funny. So there was a lot of discussion. It's during the time where the EPA was going
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nuts over fuel economy. The Corvette's a poster child. It goes fast. It's got high speed and it's a gas guzzling be
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and all that sort of stuff. And so there was the discussion of V6. I'm not negative on diesels, but there was a
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discussion there by Howard Caro, why don't we put a diesel engine in it? And as you know, the performance of all of
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those kinds of cars fell off dramatically in and around those time periods. Right? So anyway, we just
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banded together as a like-minded Corvette passion people and just willed
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the V8 to stay in the program and the V6 and the diesels never made it. There you go. Thank goodness. Now after
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General Motors and Corvette, Don, you went on to be like vice chairman of Deli and the CEO of Ecom Motors
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International. Wow. Yeah, it was very interesting. I was chief engineer when I went into being
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vice president of engineering. And then I went over to Deli and I think Jack Smith at the time says, "Run, enough all
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this engineering stuff you're doing and you need to learn how to become a businessman." He said, "There's a couple
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spots that could be doing." He says, "You could take my job, except I have my job, so you can't have that one." And he
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said, "But over in the parts department," which is the steering guy's chassis, and that huge organization that
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did the parts for General Motors, which became Deli, he said, "We can make you president of one of those 15 divisions,
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and you wouldn't even have to move. So, how about that?" He says, "You won't be there long. You'll be over there for a
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couple years, but it'll teach you." Because a division of Deli had everything. Public relations,
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engineering, manufacturing, finance, everything but treasury. So you learned all the things about that. And I
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remember my first day up at Sagenol. I'm driving up to Sagenol as president of Sagenol. Okay. My first day. So I called
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up Roger Pensy and I says, "I have no clue what to do as a businessman." And Roger says, "Turn around. I'll come down
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and give you a two-hour teach on it." That's awesome. Wow. But anyway, so I went over there. Then
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we ended up getting in our heads at Deli that we should take Deli out of General Motors because we were selling all the
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GM parts, but only a few car companies. Chrysler would buy parts from Deli, but Ford wouldn't. They said, "Look, we just
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give you guys money to buy steering gear and then you give the money to General Motors, and they come out and beat us up on trucks." So, they wouldn't. But we
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said, "Okay, we're good. We know how to do all this technical stuff." Because I'd say 70% of the intellectual property
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in General Motors was in Deli. It's steering and chassis and all that sort of stuff, right? Because car companies basically stamp
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metals, make engines, and assemble. Yeah. And the rest of the parts come from suppliers. So anyway, we spun that off.
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I helped spin that off with the CEO at the time, the president Battenburg. And I remember one day that they called me
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up and say, "Hey, we want to offer you a job back here at General Motors as president of Saab." I listened to the
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pitch. It was pretty good. At that time, I was in a great spot over at Deli. And they wanted to take Saab and go up
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against BMW. Huh. Okay. And I looked at Lou Hughes and I said, "Lou, that's impossible." I
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said, "There is no way this little car that New Hampshire school teachers buy, the Saab, okay, this eccentric little
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car is going to go up against BMW." So I said, "I think I'll stay at Deli."
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Nice. Nice. Then I went over there and then left Deli. Eventually I became vice chairman
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and ran engineering, manufacturing, all that. There you go. And then Benode Kosa called me up and says, "Hey, I have this new engine
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company. You know the guy that invented the engine, Peter Hoffire. He comes out of Volkswagen. So would you become the CEO? And I went from that and then did
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other venture capital stuff to stuff I still do today. Nice. That's awesome. Now buddy, we
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talked about this a little bit earlier and you alluded to Zora, but you were involved with Zora and some of the
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really cool experimental projects called Serve CERV. Talk about that program
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because those cars were just fantastic. Yeah, as always being an admirer of Dunto, I only interacted with him for a
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very short time near the end of his career just as I was getting started on the Camaro side, but I always admired
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him. Obviously, I have a ton of Zora stories. We'll skip those right now. He did the Serve One, the Corvette
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experimental research vehicle one and two. These were open wheels. He meant them as race cars and so forth. So many
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years later when I was at advanced vehicle engineering, I sort of got it in my head talking at the time we owned
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Lotus and I became very good friends with Tony Rudd who was the chief engineer of Lotus did their Formula 1
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team and just a wonderful wonderful person and we became very very good friends and ended up doing the ZR1
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engine between the engine guys at Chevy and Lotus and that's the one that became in the first ZR1 32 valve engine.
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Yeah. So, we discussed what could we do as a tour to force to do another serve
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and I sort of had to call it the Corp experimental research vehicle because I was not actually in Chevy at the time.
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Okay. Later, I think they renamed it the Corvette experimental research vehicle, but that's probably a closely held
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secret. But anyway, and John Lamb when he was at Rodent Track did just a wonderful article and if you Google the
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ser three, it's just loaded out there with YouTubes and so forth about it. It was one of the many mid-engine concepts
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that were done for Corvette over the years. It was by far the most sophisticated concept vehicle of any
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kind of concept vehicle the GM had ever done. So, it was a fabulous product to work on because basically between us and
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Mlen and Tony Rudd, we said, "We're going to put everything we can think of in this vehicle." And we actually did a
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presentation to ourselves saying, "Could we actually do a supercar?" And I remember Gordon Murray called me up one
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day and he came over to the auto show and he says, "I'd like to see your Serve 3." This is before he was doing the
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McLaren stuff. Wow. Because the car when you look at it, mid engine, put the ZR1 engine in it, the
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aluminum 32 valve with twin turbos. I think it's reported to be at 600 horsepower. I think we were closer to
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800. It had four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering, the Lotus active suspension,
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which is still the most phenomenal suspension system ever. Arrington Senna won the Detroit Grand Prix with active
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suspension on his Lotus at the time. So we put that in there. It had throttle kickers. So just before the wheels would
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break loose, your gas pedal would sort of kick in your foot and say, "Hey, if you push any harder, these wheels are going to break traction. So just have
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that in mind." And so we had force vectoring controls so we know each wheel where it was and
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what it was doing and could apply the right amount of power to that wheel. And since we had control of the suspension
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and the steering and the drive, we could put the power there. We could steer the rear wheels as well as the front wheels.
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So, it had a phenomenal capability in terms of just dynamic control.
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It was there. You can read about John's article, Lamb's article. You can dig that out. It probably was the best
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coverage of it, but there must be a thousand articles out there on this car. It's sort of the mid-enine car that
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wasn't. Yeah, absolutely right. And I love the look of it. The whole serve project from surf one, serve two, and serve three was
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fantastic. It was a great idea. And Jerry Palmer did the design of the serve three and obviously C4 and C5 and so forth. You
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know, in my day with all the various teams, I had the terrific responsibility to lead. We did the first contemporary
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electric vehicle, the impact, which turned out to be the EV1, hybrids, gas turbines, cambering machines, the lean
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machine, the ultralight, which we did with Bert Rutan. I just got off the phone with him this morning actually.
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Wow. Which was a 100 mile per gallon four passenger vehicle. We did it because we said, "Hey, at 100 miles per gallon, it
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doesn't matter what gasoline costs, right? You'll spend more money on Starbucks." Yeah. And just on and on. The Sunraer when we
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went to Australia and we won the race and second place came in two and a half days after we did. These were all
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terrific projects for engineers to show what could be. That's what a concept car is to be. To push the envelope.
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Yeah. Absolutely right. And buddy, congratulations are in order for you. We just found out that you've been nominated for the Corvette Hall of Fame.
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That is outstanding. Well, thanks a lot. We'll see what happens here. I referred to mine, I
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think, in section one, Claire McKen, who has had all those Corvettes in there. He actually didn't get inducted until after
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he died. So, I hope that's not true after being Corvette.
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That's funny. Well, Don, thank you so much for taking the time to be on Corvette today. It has been an honor and
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a pleasure having you on the show. My pleasure. A lot of fun and keep doing what you're doing.
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Thanks again for listening and watching Corvette Today. And be sure to tell your family, friends, and other Corvette
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enthusiasts about the Corvette Today Show. And thanks to our sponsors, Wheelcraft. Want to dress up your
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Corvette with bright chrome or black chrome wheels? Visit wheelcraft.com to learn about their advanced PVD chrome
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warranty. Visit wheelcraft.com today or call 833639-4231.
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