“It looks like your Corvette gave birth to a baby,” said the passerby in the parking lot of Delta’s Sun God Arena. He had spotted the gleaming Riverside Red 1963 Corvette roadster parked beside a mini version of itself and wanted to know more. Owner Greg Ballantyne jokingly told him the little look-alike was the first EV Corvette and the first Corvette with a mid-engine. He was referring to the 1963 Corvette go-cart that General Motors used to draw families into showrooms to see the lineup of newly minted 1963 cars.
Greg’s mini-Corvette was displayed beside his restored 1963 Corvette roadster. Greg’s interest in Corvettes began in the late-Sixties when his girlfriend’s sister bought a slightly used 1966 roadster. “She worked on freighters and was often away. She would toss me the keys and ask me to look after her Corvette while she was gone,” Greg recalls. “So, here I was in my early twenties driving a nearly new Corvette convertible.”
He vowed to have his own Corvette one day. In 1971, after marrying his high school sweetheart Patti, he began the search for the right car.
“Remember Belmont Motors and Gladstone Motors?” he asked, recalling iconic Vancouver car lots from more than half-a-century ago that sold great used cars including Corvettes. The purchase of his 1963 roadster came when he answered a newspaper ad. “It had 26 coats of bright green metalflake paint on it,” he says. “I bought it anyway.”
The car became his daily driver as he and Patti built careers with Safeway food stores. Greg joined the B.C. Corvette Club and learned more about the car he was driving. “I looked at the trim tag and discovered the car was originally Riverside Red. It had the original numbers matching engine, transmission and rear end along with the correct black interior.”
A body shop operator convinced him to have the car repainted in its original colour and Greg drove his now red Corvette for several more years. Then the decision was made to give the car a full body-off-the-frame restoration. Greg stripped the car down to the bare body and frame and hired master painter Terry Osiowy to do the body and paint work while he took over the restoration of the frame, suspension, running gear and interior.
After Greg reassembled the 1963 Corvette roadster, it looked better than the day it was delivered to the first owner. Greg had searched out new or better replacement parts for his Corvette restoration by going to swap meets, including the Corvette-only swap meet held annually in Puyallup, Washington. It was there that he came across a completely disassembled and very rare 1963 Corvette go-cart. General Motors commissioned 1,000 mini-Corvettes with fibreglass bodies and electric power for its dealers to show at high schools and malls across the United States.
“The idea was to give young people tickets to come and drive the battery powered mid-engine go-carts at dealerships,” Greg explains. “It was a promotion designed to bring their parents in to look at the new cars, including the all-new 1963 Corvette, Stingray. The mini-Corvettes only came in red.”
The seller had the body of the mini-Corvette painted red before Greg received it. After he got it home, Greg painstakingly assembled into a working go-cart designed for speeds up to 9 km/h (six mph).
Greg and Patti have now owned their 1963 Corvette for 53 years. They have a special trailer so the restored Corvette can be displayed at shows with its apparent ‘mini’ offspring. The trophy room at their North Delta home is jammed to the ceiling as their restored car is one of Western Canada’s most awarded Corvettes.
It has also received the coveted Top Flight Award four times from the National Corvette Restorers Society scoring 97.9 points out of 100. Greg and Patti proudly display a photo of Corvette performance engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov with their car taken at a show in Victoria in 1992.
Their car continues to get stares from show visitors who think they are seeing double and didn’t know Corvettes had babies.
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and a partner in a Vancouver-based public relations company. [email protected]
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