What Are Scaglietti Chevrolet Corvettes & Why Were They So Controversial?

Older Corvettes are known for their American muscle car aesthetic and powerful performance, but you may be surprised to hear that there was an older Corvette that became controversial for the opposite reasons. The Scaglietti Corvette is the brainchild of wealthy Texan Gary Laughlin, along with Italian car designer Sergio Scaglietti, featuring a Ferrari-inspired design atop a Corvette chassis. While it sounds like a car with the potential to be great, it fell short in a number of ways.

Laughlin was a wealthy oil-driller and the owner of a Chevy dealership who enjoyed racing Ferraris — he was also friends with Carroll Shelby. They would often discuss the idea of a Corvette with an Italian body style, and decided they had the money and engineering know-how to make it happen. By 1959, the idea became a full-fledged project, with Laughlin partnering with Scaglietti — referred to by Ferrari as the "maestro of aluminum" — to make three coupes. Scaglietti has designed some of the most stunning Ferraris in history, with many Scaglietti designs going at auction for millions — could he bring that same magic to the Corvette?

Three Corvette chassis were shipped to Italy: one with a 315 horsepower Ramjet fuel-injected V8, and the other two with twin-carb engines. The first model carried over the Corvette grille, but the other two emulated the Ferrari Tour de France. The Corvettes were supposed to be shipped back to Texas with their Italian bodies in a few months, but there were some issues along the way that ended up taking two years.

There were two significant issues with the Scaglietti Corvette, firstly related to the new styling. Instead of the early Corvette's muscle car body, the Scaglietti Corvettes had curvy, sporty aluminum bodies heavily inspired by Ferrari. The story goes that when the cars were nearly complete, Enzo Ferrari entered Scaglietti's shop and demanded to know what was happening. When Scaglietti explained the project, Ferrari threatened the designer: "If you do one more, you'll never do another car for me." 

On the American side, GM was demanding that the project be stopped. "I was living in Italy at the time," Carroll Shelby recalled to MotorTrend. "The cars at Scaglietti were just about done. [Chevy General Manager] Ed Cole woke me up with a phone call at two in the morning, and told me to forget the whole thing. He got his ass chewed out by GM management and was told to drop the project."

The second issue was related to the Scaglietti Corvette's performance. You'd think that a Corvette-Ferrari hybrid would be an exceptional driving experience, but the chassis left the car feeling heavy, awkward, and slow, despite its lightweight body. Laughlin himself didn't even want to keep his Scaglietti Corvette, reporting that the front end would lift off the ground at high speeds. While the Scaglietti Corvette is a unique project, its body and performance ended up being more controversial than iconic when looking back at the rare beauty.