Collecting: A Revered Nameplate Makes an Encore

Mr. Mitchell, who died in 1988, was a showman, a flamboyant ringmaster given to wearing silver riding leathers when piloting his motorcycles. As vice president for styling at General Motors for 19 years, he influenced the designs of millions of automobiles.

Mr. Welburn’s personality is quite the opposite, the sort of executive often called classy and no more likely to wear a silver leather outfit than a Carmen Miranda stack-of-bananas hat. Mr. Welburn has been the head of global design at G.M. since 2003, influencing cars built all over the world.

Mr. Mitchell oversaw the design of the best-known Sting Ray, the much admired Corvette redesign that was introduced for 1963, as well as an earlier racecar called the Stingray. Mr. Welburn is the man who resurrected the name for 2014, the seventh-generation Corvette arriving this fall.

That first Sting Ray almost never happened. As the ’50s progressed, Chevy executives considered dumping their sports car in favor of a personal coupe like Ford’s successful Thunderbird. Happily, that never happened, and the second-generation Corvette — now nicknamed the C2 — was a giant step forward from the original car.

Zora Arkus-Duntov, the engineer whose impassioned appeal had saved the Corvette from the chopping block, and his boss, Ed Cole, compromised with the financial executives to give the C2 modern features like an independent rear suspension. They had wanted still more, but at least Corvettes could now go head-to-head with Ferraris on a racetrack and win.

What really stole hearts, though, was the singular design of the ’63 models.

In 1957, Peter Brock was a 20-year-old designer at G.M.’s Research B studio in the bowels of the corporation’s design center in Warren, Mich. Mr. Mitchell strode into the studio with photos from the Turin Motor Show of aero-slick speed-record-style cars, many of them smooth, almost liquid, forms that drew from Alfa Romeo’s Disco Volante — or flying saucer — design. Mr. Mitchell challenged the studio’s young designers to work from that reference point, and Brock’s shape was the winner.

One little problem arose. Development of the Corvette was hampered by a ban on racing, instigated by the Automobile Manufacturers Association, which took its toll on performance programs.

The Corvette program had to go sub rosa, but Mr. Mitchell had a plan. Before the A.M.A. ban, G.M. had developed the Corvette SS, a racecar with world-beating potential. Now the SS was redundant, but there was a spare chassis. Mr. Mitchell bought it and had an open sports car body built that was essentially the Brock design with the top lopped off.

The car was built in what Mr. Brock calls “a secret studio, hidden behind a tool armory called the Hammer Room.” Dr. Dick Thompson, a dentist, would drive it to the Sports Car Club of America’s C/Modified championship in 1960. Mr. Mitchell didn’t dare put the names Chevrolet or Corvette on the car; a deep-sea fisherman, he named it Stingray.

Or Sting Ray. (Today it is known as the Mitchell Racer or by its G.M. designation, XP-87.) Both spellings have been used on the production cars, and Mr. Welburn brought it back for 2014 as one word to honor Mr. Mitchell.

The Chevrolet and Corvette names finally appeared on the racecar in 1961, at Riverside Raceway in Southern California, after the C2 ’Vette had been approved for production and its designers, Larry Shinoda and Tony Lapine, put finishing touches on the 1963 Sting Ray.

“At long last America has a formidable weapon to challenge Europe’s fastest grand touring cars on their home ground,” Car and Driver magazine said when it tested the Sting Ray. Chevrolet offered the car in two body styles, a convertible and a coupe with a spine dividing the back window. Duntov’s developments included a modern suspension at both ends, and it was offered with as much as 360 V-8 horsepower and a 4-speed transmission.