It all started more than 100 years ago with Chevrolet co-founder Louis Chevrolet’s passion for racing.
Chevrolet, an iconic brand in American motorsports, has won the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Manufacturers’ Championship 35 times, and is the most successful name in that series’ history. Corvette Racing has taken seven class trophies at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and, between 1988 and 2002, a Chevrolet-branded V-8 engine won the Indy 500 seven times!
As Chevrolet continues to define itself as a global automotive leader, motorsports remain integral to the plan. The racing version of the Chevrolet Cruze, which since its 2009 debut has become the bowtie brand’s best-selling car globally, claimed the World Touring Car Championship (WTCC) Cup in 2010 and 2011. It’s the first-ever GM-branded vehicle to win such honors in a FIA-organized series.
During the past 100 years, innumerable defining moments have shaped Chevrolet’s racing history. Until May 20, 1905, Swiss-born and recent U.S. immigrant Louis Chevrolet was just another New York chauffeur. Given a chance that day to drive an underpowered Fiat in a timed event at the old hippodrome in Morris Park, he broke the great Barney Oldfield’s closed-course one-mile world record.
On May 27, Chevrolet was back in the Fiat, this time in a head-to-head race against Oldfield and other daredevil drivers in a sport that had begun to captivate the country. He beat them all. It was front-page news in The New York Times. Next up was the Vanderbilt Cup, a road race on Long Island, where his dauntless driving brought him more notoriety.
By 1909, General Motors founder William C. “Billy” Durant had engaged Chevrolet, who in addition to being a renown racing driver had become an accomplished, if self-taught, mechanical engineer, to drive and help develop his Buick racing team’s cars. After Durant lost control of GM in 1910, Durant and Chevrolet began talking about a new car-making adventure, which on Nov. 3, 1911, became Chevrolet Motor Car Company. One hundred years later, it’s still not clear whether Durant wanted a car that his new partner was designing, or just his name. Louis Chevrolet soon left the company, but his never-give-up competitive spirit permeates the brand to this day.
No car company has been more closely associated with the Indianapolis 500 race over the last 100 years than Chevrolet. Both institutions got their start in 1911.
In the early days, the three Chevrolet brothers, Louis, Arthur and Gaston, drove in the Indy 500. The state-of-the-art machines they designed and built won back-to-back victories in 1920 and 1921. The V-8 racing engine that Chevrolet collaborated with England’s Ilmor Engineering to build in the 1980s had won six consecutive 500s. It and a brand-new 2.2-Liter twin-turbo V-6 Indy engine are being prepared for 2012, above.
Chevrolet and the Indy 500 may be most firmly linked in the public mind today by the 22 bowtie-badged cars that have paced the Indy classic since 1948. The first was a gray ’48 Fleetmaster convertible. Over the years, Chevrolet has found Indy to be an ideal venue for revealing new models and introducing significant product developments. In 1967 it was the new Camaro and in 2009, the all-new 2010 Camaro, which brought the nameplate back after a seven-year hiatus.
Chevrolet’s performance reputation was virtually non-existent in the early 1950s. Perceptions quickly changed when the first of the brand’s legendary small-block V-8 engines appeared in 1955 models, below. Soon, word spread through the racing world that Chevrolet’s new lightweight and compact V-8 developed by Ed Cole and his engineers had incredible performance potential.
The small-block V-8 soon demonstrated its stock car racing potential, with several early 1955 season wins at short-track events. But the real breakout came at the NASCAR Southern 500 held at the Darlington, SC “super speedway” on Labor Day, 1955. Driver Herb Thomas led a surprise Chevrolet rout that saw seven of the new V-8s finish in the Top 10!
With the Darlington win, the Chevrolet V-8 came into its own, and NASCAR racing would never be the same. While the powerful larger cars that had previously dominated the circuit were shredding tires and losing engines that day, the Chevrolets just kept on going. Although running with a smaller engine and less horsepower, the Chevrolets were considerably lighter, giving them better gas mileage – resulting in fewer pit stops. And the new cars shocked everybody by going the distance without tire changes.
Founded in Detroit in 1911, Chevrolet celebrates its centennial as a global automotive brand with annual sales of about 4.25 million vehicles in more than 140 countries. Chevrolet’s portfolio includes iconic performance cars such as Corvette and Camaro, dependable, long-lasting pickups and SUVs such as Silverado and Suburban and award-winning passenger cars and crossovers such as Sonic, Cruze, Malibu, Equinox and Traverse. The 2013 ZL1 Camaro, below, will be the most powerful ever; sports a supercharged 580-horsepower small-block.
Chevrolet also offers "gas-friendly solutions including Cruze Eco and Volt. Cruze Eco offers 42-mpg highway while Volt offers 35 miles of electric, gasoline-free driving and an additional 344 miles of extended gasoline range, according to EPA estimates.
For more information about the latest vehicles from Chevrolet, please visit, www.chevrolet.com