New Chevrolet Corvette started life as Holden Ute

A Frankenstein Holden Ute was the car that started it all for the landmark new Chevrolet Corvette.

Holden Commodore bits and pieces were used to create a mid-engined prototype in 2013 for the all-new Corvette, which has just been confirmed as the first of its breed to be produced in right-hand drive from the factory in the US.

The front-end might have looked like a Holden Ute, but it was just camouflage for the most radical development in the history of America’s favourite supercar.

The car was called Blackjack -- not a reference to Sir Jack Brabham’s nickname but more likely related to the colour of the car and its buccaneering behaviour like that of a pirate with the same nickname.

“Blackjack. The beginning,” confirmed Mark Reuss, the president of General Motors, during the unveiling of the showroom-ready C8 Corvette on Friday.

There is no obvious for Reuss’ connection to Blackjack, even though he did serve time as the CEO of Holden before returning to Detroit to rise rapidly up the ranks at GM and would have driven it during early prototype runs.

Reuss has been test driving recently at the Nurburgring, as one of the handful of senior GM executives with the special license required for official racetrack activities, and it’s likely that his time in Germany included ‘Ring runs in the Corvette.

But Blackjack was a creation of the Corvette development team under the direction of executive chief engineer, Tadge Juechter.

It has survived through the test and development program for the C8 and was recently revealed to selected journalists as part of the Corvette launch program.

The Frankenstein work on the car saw GM start with a Commodore front-end, grafted the cabin from the previous-generation C7 Corvette behind it, then use the ute’s tail-end to hide the workings of the mid-mounted V8 powertrain.

“Before, we could disguise development work by tweaking a current car. You can’t do that with mid-engine proportions, so we decided to make it look like a ute,” Juechter told Popular Mechanics.

Blackjack was created with dozens of hand-made parts at a top-secret garage called The Lair at GM’s advanced vehicle facility at Warren in Michigan.

Underneath the Holden front-end is technology far away from the Commodore’s, including an interior more like a race car than a production machine, and even the gearbox is a Frankenstein-style PDK snitch from a Porsche.

Blackjack was used for advanced research and development until 2016, when engineers switched to prototypes based on the C7 Corvette before advancing into the cars which would eventually become the C8, which will come to Holden dealers by 2021.