Who doesn’t love the ’63 Split-Window Corvette? It’s always up there with the Jag E-Type when people list their “Most Beautiful Cars Ever.”
As such, it’s been pretty well documented over the years, up to and including in a book by the car’s designer Pete Brock himself. So do we really need another look at the car?
Yes!
Collector Jerry Logan and his son Sterling share the world’s obsession with the ‘63 Split-Window.
Jerry Logan has had a few of them over the years and recently restored one to his own specs.
He likes it, so much so that he hired documentary filmmaker David Panton to make a movie about it.
The restoration itself actually debuted at the SEMA show in 2013. The documentary just came out this summer.
“This whole project came about when Sterling presented an initial idea of doing a web series on his father’s car collection that spans over a hundred vehicles,” said filmmaker Panton. “We narrowed down the top 10 we wanted to start with and identified the ‘63 Split Window as being the pilot episode to test it out on.”
(Originally there were going to be 10 shorter videos on Logan's top ten cars from his collection, but this longer documentary has replaced that idea. At this point, there are no plans for the other vehicles, but that could change in the future, says Panton. You can see Jerry's other vehicles here: jerrysrides.com
Not Just Any Car
The more Panton and the Logans worked on the Corvette film, the more they saw it wasn’t just another car.
“As we dug deeper into the history and learned about the amazing story behind its inception, the original idea naturally shifted towards a longer documentary,” Panton said. “And when Pete (Brock) was willing to get involved, it just made sense to go all in on this story since we’d never seen another film tell the story of this vehicle.”
Thus, the film starts out as a history of the C2, the car that would become known as the Sting Ray. We see GM styling head Bill Mitchell and his absolute dedication to the project. Despite GM’s official ban on racing at the time, and its seeming disinterest in making a new Corvette, Mitchell went so far as to finance development of the car with his own money.
From a number of drawings presented by GM design staff, Mitchell chose those of Pete Brock, then just 20 years old and straight out of Art Center College of Design. The doc does an excellent job of presenting the history and development of the car, with numerous interviews of Pete Brock in his home outside Las Vegas.
Then, halfway through, the film switches to the Logan car.
“When my dad decided to restore his ’63 Sting Ray there were several design features he wanted to modify to make it his very own,” says Sterling in the film. “It’s his way of putting his personal touch, or signature in a sense, on the vehicle.”
The Main Attraction
“The first thing that came to my mind is, ‘I’m going to lower it,” says Jerry.
“He lowers every vehicle,” says Sterling.
Then he scrubbed the whitewalls off the tires, painted the rims a sleek silver and gray, then went to work on the car’s scoops and vents, which, he says, “were a little bland.”
“One of his ideas was to take these non-functioning vents and scoops and give them a stainless-steel accent, and he even went as far as putting wire mesh underneath them to make them look like they were actually functional,” Sterling says. “This was my dad’s version of adding his own ‘surface entertainment’ to the vehicle.”
“Surface entertainment” is what Brock had called the non-functional vents and scoops on the original car.
Next, he added flush door handles, tore out the car’s black interior, and put in midnight blue. Outside he replaced the original “Sebring Silver” with a custom fine silver from PPG paint.
The finished car is not a radical departure from stock, but it looks better.
“Wow, that stance, it was the first thing that grabbed me,” the senior Logan says. “When I looked at that paint it just popped.”
The Deets
“The changes that my dad makes to the car are very subtle, but to car collectors, maybe they’re over the top,” says Sterling.
Everything’s cool, though, because Brock himself likes it.
“Jerry’s vision of what the car should be, I think he’s right on,” says Brock. “He’s taken those things (surface features) and he’s made them functional. He’s also accented them a little bit, which Bill Mitchell would have loved had he gone back and shown this car to Mitchell in 1963.”
Check it out for yourself in the documentary on YouTube.
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