GM dealer Rick Hendrick wins auction with a $3.7 million bid for the VIN 001 Corvette ZR1
GM dealer Rick Hendrick won a live auction with a record $3.7 million bid for the VIN 001 Corvette ZR1.
- “The Godfather of the Corvette” Zora Arcas Dontov defended the car’s V-8 engine and performance legacy.
- His personal 1974 Corvette Stingray, restored by the National Corvette Museum, will be published.
- The restored Corvette features a unique customization that reflects Arkus-Duntov’s personal touch and passion for the car.
Zora Arkus-Duntov defended car production in the 1950s and was known as the “The Godfather of the Corvette” for putting a V-8 engine in the General Motors to make it a true performance car.
However, Arkus-Duntov owned one Corvette in his lifetime: the 1974 Corvette Stingray. When the car unveils at the 31st anniversary ceremony of the National Corvette Museum on August 28-30, 2025, the public can see the car returning to its full glory.
The car has been undergoing thorough and expensive restoration for the past two years, in preparation for its release and permanent display at the newly opened Hall of Fame exhibition. The museum is located across the street from GM’s Bowling Green Assembly Factory in Kentucky. This is the factory where GM builds the Corvette.
Museum staff say that since the museum first acquired it in 1995, Arkus-Duntov’s cars have been a major attraction to attract Corvette enthusiasts.
“For the museum and the Corvette community, this car is valuable. It’s kind of one. It’s like finding the number one 1953 Corvette.” “For Corvette enthusiasts, they remember Zora and his wife Elphy in that car, so they start to see this car.”
Arkus-Duntov is coming to America
According to a 2014 biography of the car and driver, Arcas Dontov, born in 1909 to wealthy Russian parents in Brussels, Belgium, spent more than 20 years as an engineer at GM. In the 1930s he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Charlottenburg in Berlin. However, during this time he saw a troubling situation in Germany, especially for Jews. So Arcas Dontov and his wife, former Elfi Wolf, fled for Paris and then fled to America.
He joined GM in 1953 as a development engineer, and Arkus-Duntov quickly fell in love with the Harley Earl Corvette prototype at New York Motorma in 1953.
“(Arkus-Duntov) fired the full brunt of his persuasive power to convince Chevrolet boss Ed Cole and GM R&D director Maurice Ollie that the production corvette was GM’s “turning point” and that his contributions would help contribute to what the driver wrote.
Make your Corvette a world-class car
Ryan Eichler, chief marketing officer at the Corvette Museum, said the 1953 Corvette included a “Blue Flame Six” engine. According to Motorrend, the Blue Flame Six was a six-cylinder engine that produced 150 horsepower. Arkus-Duntov knew that the Corvette needed something more powerful.
“We consider him to be the Godfather of the Corvette because when you think about Corvette’s DNA, it’s about performance, innovation and design,” Eichler said. “The first Corvette had a design, but he convinced GM to make it a performance car. He convinced GM to put it in the first V8 in 1955.”
Arkus-Duntov believed that the Corvette would be a true performance car. GM enters the V8 and “opens the market and sets the tone for Corvette’s success in the remaining 70+ years,” says Eichler.
But his contributions exceeded that. When Corvette sales shaking in 1957 and GM considered killing the car, Arkus-Duntov stepped up again. He remade it as a Chevrolet Hello car. The Hello Car is a stylish, high-end car that aims to shed light on the brand’s technology and design skills. The aim is to attract new car buyers to the brand, not the mass sellers themselves.
Arkus-Duntov’s Corvette strategy has earned him an internal respect and “work to evolve the Corvette from a fashionable, stringless two-seater to a world-class sports car,” the car and driver writes.
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The only one
Arkus-Duntov only owned it before his death in Michigan on April 21, 1996, despite his apparent passion for Corvette.
“I imagined myself as a senior engineer at GM in the 1960s and 1970s, and I didn’t have to buy a car,” Eichler said. “He would take prototypes and drive them as a daily driver.”
However, in 1974, a year before he was due to retire, Arkus-Duntov decided to give himself a retirement gift. It was the last year of a big block V8 engine for cars and he wanted to get one given that engine was working so hard to push it to be in the Corvette, Garrett said.
So Arcas Dontoff purchased a 1974 Corvette Stringray from a dealer in Michigan where he lived at the time. Garrett didn’t know the name of the dealer who sold the car to Arkus-Duntov or how much he paid for it. Garrett said the Corvette was sold in 1974 for around $5,000.
Arks Dundov’s corvette was made at GM’s factory in St. Louis, Missouri, Garrett said. The first 1953 model was handmade in Flint, Michigan. That year, I only managed to do about 300.
In 1954, GM moved production of the Corvette to St. Louis, which remained until 1981. GM then moved production to its current location at its Bowling Green Assembly Factory in Kentucky.
Eichler said that Arcas Dontov bought the car from silver, but a year later he repainted it into a “bright green” colour of a Corvette.
“Zola and many designers are never satisfied with what they have and want to customize it,” Eichler said. “So he had it painted green and then he left it to a friend to repaint it.
According to Eichler, the museum does not have a document on when the painting job took place, but the two-tone colors present in the car are light blue and dark blue, known as Spectramaster Medium Blue. The museum doesn’t have a specific name for dark blue, Eichler said.
“Zola loved the job of painting cars so much that he had his wife stand next to her car and draw it,” Garrett said. The portrait is at the National Corvette Museum.
Restoring classics with great care
Arkus-Duntov owned the car until the mid-1980s before selling it to couples. They owned it until 1995, but they donated it to the museum, Garrett said. The museum has never evaluated an Arcas Dontov car, so Garrett doesn’t know how much it is worth. However, he said the 1974 Corvette wasn’t that popular and didn’t bring much money.
“The nice stuff is on sale for around $15,000,” Garrett said. “For history, he’ll say he’s quite worthwhile.”
The Arkus-Duntov Corvette was on display at the National Corvette Museum from 1995 to 2023.
“We were redesigning the area and then we discovered how much damage the car had been sitting there and how much rust there was,” Garrett said. “This was Zora’s daily driver, and he drove it in the snow in the rain… So the fuel line was rotten and rotten, the gas line was rotten… so it was when we started talking about preserving the car.”
Eichler added that he has 100,831 miles when Arkus-Duntov’s car was donated. When a car is donated to the museum, it becomes an artifact and is not driven, so there are still 100,831 miles of miles.
For nearly two years, the museum team meticulously repaired the vehicle. Garrett said they would remove the body from the frame and peel the frame down to exposed metal to secure the rust. They restored full front and rear suspension. They put in a new braking system, a new fuel system, and rebuilt the engine and power steering system.
“The body and inside were pretty amazing and there was a lot of Zora history, so we let it go,” Garrett said.
The parts to do the entire project cost around $20,000, but that number doesn’t include the 964 hours of business hours spent on the work. Garrett and Eichler said it was worth it.
“You can look at the car and see how special it is by its appearance,” Eichler said. “There’s a special touch like a two-tone blue, and I paint Zad’s hands on each door. He took the time to customize it and make it his own.”
In addition to being able to see the Arkus-Duntov corvette, visitors will see museum staff working on the next project: Preservation of the LT1 Corvette in 1971, Garrett said.
With 115,000 square feet of Corvette and Corvette artifacts, the museum is open seven days a week from 9am to 5pm and has a general admission fee of $25.
Jamie L. Larrow is a senior Autos writer covering Ford Motor Company for the Detroit Free Press. Please contact Jamie at jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @Jarouan. Sign up for our car newsletter. Become a subscriber.
