Chevy’s Back-Door Skunkworks Built A Corvette-Powered Chevy II The SCCA Wouldn’t Approve
General Motors had publicly stepped away from racing, but that didn’t stop people with Chevrolet connections from developing cars that could compete. In Anaheim, California, Bill Thomas Race Cars was working on a compact with Corvette power and suspension hardware, intended for SCCA road racing. The project wasn’t Thomas’s first attempt to put a lightweight Chevrolet against more established competition. An earlier build had already been rejected by the sanctioning body, setting up another attempt that would meet the same fate. The cars eventually found a different kind of competition, but drag racing wasn’t what Thomas had originally built them to do.
A Previous Rejection Had Already Put Thomas On Notice
Bill Thomas had already explored the idea of putting Corvette performance into a smaller Chevrolet. His 1962 Bad Bascom hardtop paired a fuel-injected Corvette 327 V8 with Corvette independent rear suspension in a much lighter car. Bad Bascom weighed 2,230 pounds, compared with roughly 3,100 pounds for a Corvette.
That difference was central to the concept. A lighter car with a powerful engine and independent rear suspension had potential as a road racer, where weight and suspension behavior mattered alongside horsepower. Thomas wasn’t simply modifying a showroom car with bolt-on performance parts. He was rethinking the package around competition.
Bad Bascom Was Already Pushing The Limits
The Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) rejected Bad Bascom as a prototype, shutting down its intended racing route. The decision left Thomas with a clear problem: building an interesting competition car wasn’t enough if it couldn’t qualify under the governing body’s rules.
The timing made the situation more complicated. Following the 1963 Automobile Manufacturers Association ban on manufacturer-sponsored racing, GM publicly withdrew from organized racing activities. Thomas operated independently, although his Chevrolet connections have led accounts to describe his operation as a back-door skunkworks. That description captures the relationship’s unusual context, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for proof that GM officially sanctioned every project.
Thomas tried again, this time with a more radical approach to the compact Chevrolet.
Bill Thomas Built A Corvette-Powered Chevy II For B/Production
The next project was a fiberglass-bodied Chevy II fastback intended for SCCA B/Production competition. The cars combined a fuel-injected Corvette 327 V8 with Corvette independent rear suspension and fully adjustable front suspension. A lightweight body completed a package designed for road courses rather than a drag strip.
Accounts disagree on how many Thomas built. MotorTrend and Motortopia report four fastbacks, while other sources give a total of three. The timeline also varies: some accounts date the project to 1964, while another describes 1963-model convertibles being received for conversion. Those discrepancies make a definitive production count or build date difficult to establish.
The Hardware Was Meant For Corners, Not Just The Strip
The Corvette engine supplied the power, but the suspension choices reveal the broader ambition. Independent rear suspension allowed each rear wheel to respond to road surfaces separately, while an adjustable front end offered scope to tune the car for competition. The fiberglass body also helped keep weight down.
These features made sense for a road-racing effort, where drivers needed a car that could change direction and maintain control through corners, not simply accelerate in a straight line. The fastbacks were a more developed attempt at Thomas’s earlier idea: combine Corvette hardware with a lighter, smaller Chevrolet.
But a purpose-built package still needed approval before it could compete in the class Thomas had targeted.
The SCCA Refused The Cars, And The Drag Strip Became Plan B
The SCCA refused to homologate the fastbacks for the proposed B/Production effort. Low production numbers and the cars’ extensive departures from stock configuration are possible explanations, but the available accounts don’t establish the sanctioning body’s exact reasoning. It’s safer to describe the outcome than to claim the cars were rejected simply because they were too fast.
A separate rule change often enters the story here. In 1964, the FIA increased its homologation requirement for GT-class cars from 100 to 1,000 units. That affected eligibility under FIA rules, but it was not the SCCA regulation governing Thomas’s proposed B/Production entry. The two decisions shouldn’t be treated as the same ruling.
CKC Racing Found A Different Use For The Fastback
With the road-racing plan dead, Thomas reportedly lost GM support and sold the cars to recover costs. CKC Racing bought one for $2,500 and won F/XS Eliminator at the 1964 AHRA Nationals. The car had found a competitive home, though in a discipline it wasn’t originally designed to enter.
Later accounts credit the CKC car with running low-nine-second passes at nearly 150 mph on nitromethane. Those figures are less consistently corroborated, so they deserve attribution rather than treatment as settled performance records. By late 1966, the car reportedly struggled with chassis stress caused by severe wheelstands.
The drag strip gave the project a second life, but it couldn’t undo the lost road-racing opportunity.
A Road Racer That Never Got Its Intended Race
The fastbacks are often remembered for their drag-racing careers, but that was the detour, not the destination. Thomas had set out to build a compact road racer using Corvette power and suspension, then found that the rules would not let his cars compete as intended. The rejection redirected the project before its original purpose could be tested on track.
The Rejection Became Part Of The Car’s Legacy
That is what makes the story more interesting than a footnote in early funny-car history. The cars weren’t merely odd-looking drag machines. They were an attempt by an independent builder to challenge the limits of a production-based racing class, using engineering choices that went well beyond a standard Chevy II.
Enthusiasts are left with the engineering, the surviving history, and the unanswered question of what these cars might have done on a road course. The SCCA never gave Thomas that answer. The drag strip provided another chapter, but it wasn’t the race he had built them to run.
Source: Car Show Reporter, Yenko.net, SCCA, Chevrolet
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