The private teams usually ran them with 427 big blocks, and had huge success. Photo: AutoBlogĪkrus-Duntov and his team reluctantly complied and stopped building the cars, but that didn’t stop them from lending the few Grand Sports they had already built to a few private race teams. They still proved to be very successful, and beat up on the Cobras any time they were on the track at the same time. The Grand Sports often found themselves competing in prototype classes since there were never enough of them built to be considered a regular production car. I researched their cars for almost a year, and finally decided they had the right car for me.” “Then one of my friends went to work for Mongoose and told me to look into their cars. “I had been interested in a Grand Sport replica for years, but couldn’t find the right one,” says Garvin.

As these ultra-rare Corvettes have continued their steady growth in value over the past fifty years, custom auto manufacturers, like Mongoose Motorsports have responded in kind, by creating replicas, giving true Corvette enthusiasts the opportunity to experience this rare gem, firsthand. In 1963, the lightweight GS was engineered to compete with the Shelby Cobra in Grand Touring racing better known as the “Cobra Killer” only five were ever produced. In 2011, when he was looking for his next Corvette for a mixed role of track toy and cruiser, it was the highly-coveted and rare 1963 Grand Sports that drew him in. Most of Garvin’s personal Corvette collection grew from his “build it better” philosophy. For almost a decade, he’s operated Garvin’s Machine Shop in Killeen, Texas, where he’s made it his business to take broken cars and find a way to make them better than new. Further adding to his gearhead street cred, Garvin is also a machinist by trade. In fact, he currently owns seven complete models spanning four generations – from a 1963 Split Window Sting Ray to a 2004 LS6 Z06.

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