To put a new spin on something George Orwell once wrote, "All cars are equal, but some cars are more equal than others." When attending an auto show, a few vehicular masterpieces stand out from the rest. And in the case of a classic Corvette, that statement couldn't be any more true. Especially when you consider Fred Kemmerer's '63.
Looking over the Sting Ray's back forty, the car seems like any other mild-mannered split-window coupe. Even the interior appears perfectly sedate. It's not until you get a look at the blown engine sticking a third of the way out of the hood that you realize this ain't no Sunday driver. And while this sort of "reimagined" classic may be an NCRS nightmare, for Fred it's a dream come true.
"I've always wanted to build an early-'60s high-performance car with a Roots-style supercharged powerplant," Fred says. "When I got the chance to build this car around a Corvette, I was in heaven."
Fred and his wife, Anita (who put equal time into the creation of this pavement-chewing monster), love to tinker. Back in the early '80s, they built a supercharged 350 Chevy. But without an appropriate vehicle to call home, the engine was little more than set dressing inside their garage.
"I was looking for a performance-oriented GM project car to put the motor into," Fred remembers. "A friend told me he knew of one that he thought I should see. To my surprise, I found a restored '63 Corvette coupe that was available at a very reasonable price." By the end of the weekend, Fred and Anita were the owners of the nearly new-again Corvette.
But the silver beauty hadn't always been a prom queen. At some point it had been taken completely apart, and many missing items had to be relocated by a subsequent owner. After some TLC and a large amount of reworking, the basket case was roadworthy once again. But while the Vette was vintage, the engine was not, meaning that constructing a numbers-matching show car simply wasn't an option. This gave Fred the breathing room he needed to play around with the powerplant.
With a freshly restored car on their hands, the Kemmerers set to work bringing this period piece of American Muscle into the future. And while it may sound crazy to alter what some consider perfection, Fred had a special plan: to keep everything outside the engine bay as stock as possible.
"There were some minor changes to improve things like the electrical system and EFI setup," Fred says, "but we tried to stay along the lines of the original C2 Corvette design and modify it as little as possible. Where we have made changes, we removed the original parts and purchased replacements for modification purposes." Presumably, that means that at any given time, this Sting Ray could be returned to its previous state. How's that for a Transformer?
Beginning in 1982, Fred and Anita devoted 500 hours to the shoehorning in the previously built engine, careful not to permanently alter the car's dynamic originality. The result was a package closely resembling what you see today, and it remained that way for the next 19 years. Then, in 2003, the Kemmerers selected a new motor for customization, along with several newly restored pieces to help finish out the car.
The latest incarnation started with the help of Mike Faucher at Quest Racing in Worchester, Massachusetts. Faucher used his discerning eye and exquisite attention to detail to help Fred select the perfect parts to place inside a newly minted block. With the tank sumped and a new EFI setup in place, the engine was pushed between the framerails, leaving Fred set to locate a suitable replacement hood. For this, he personally massaged the fiberglass, removing thoroughly calculated amounts here and there until the engine could poke through without any clearance issues.