See the New 2020 Chevy Corvette from Every Angle

In the automotive-design world, it doesn’t get much more pressure-packed than designing the mid-engined Corvette. It’s a mythical beast on which auto enthusiasts have been projecting their fantasies for decades, even lifetimes. If a unicorn is to finally step out from the shadows, it damn well better not look like an old mule with a horn. The team members behind the design and development of the C8 were aware of the expectations. It weighed on them. For years.

Executive chief engineer Tadge Juechter says that the mid-engined C8 Corvette couldn’t be the wild fantasy of the team’s inner adolescents. It had to be a durable design, one with a reasonably long shelf life. It still had to be immediately recognizable as a Corvette, despite having new proportions. But it couldn’t be retro, because that’s a design dead end. It had to be a sort of 1963 moment: a radical redesign of the shape that opens a new era in the model’s lineage and that telegraphs the sea change beneath its skin. And, heaven forfend, it could not, under any circumstances, be boring. Oh, it also had to have enough bandwidth to serve as an easy daily driver, an accommodating road-trip car, and an occasional track car.