Vince Piggins And I Hit The Road In An L88 CorvetteVince Piggins was my boss during my time at General Motors as an experimental engineer. Despite his six-figure income, unprecedented for the '60s, he was one of the smartest and nicest men I ever had the pleasure to work with. He was a great friend because we shared the same appreciation for cars and performance. During the '60s and '70s, Vince and I worked together on many projects, including big-block Corvette development. I especially remember the L88 program as one of the most fun.
When the '68 body came along, the challenges we had with keeping the big-block-powered Corvettes cool were compounded by the smaller air inlet of the new cars. While we added a radiator shroud to the cars (something not found on the '67 L88 cars), they were still a challenge.
I fondly remember one of our development cars: a black and saddle '68 convertible. Vince and I spent a lot of time working out the bugs on that car and making changes to help performance and experiment with cooling solutions. As it is for any engineer, it was our duty to test our efforts in "real world" environments. To that end, Woodward Avenue turned out to be the perfect place to test the car, and also get a reality check with what was happening on the street.
At that time, Woodward Avenue, one of the main streets in Detroit, was a hotbed of street-racing activity. On any Saturday night (or most any other night), you could find anything from warmed-over factory musclecars to full-on race cars that were street racing, stoplight to stoplight, up and down Woodward Avenue. Altered-wheelbase semi-Funny Cars, aluminum front-end Hemi-powered lightweight cars, killer Pontiac GTOs, and hot-rod Oldsmobiles were out there running against each other. It was a wild scene. Woodward's legacy for all-out, high-speed, street-racing competition is real. It's a fact-I was there.
One day, Vince stashed our little '68 L88 test car in the parking cellar at the GM Tech Center. We met there that night and set about doing some real-world testing with the 500-plus-horsepower Corvette. Fact is, we raced that car all night, and even did some high-speed runs way out of town on Woodward. While some of the Hemi-powered cars of the time ate our lunch off the line, running supercharged engines and specialized suspensions, we had just about everybody on the top end.
I remember running the car off the end of the speedometer, meaning we were well over 160 mph. It had a 3.73:1 rear gear and lots of wheelhop, but it still ran good. Vince and I traded off the driving; he got a ticket that night and tried to blame the speeding episode on me. The cop didn't buy it. Then we headed over to Frisky's Big Boy for some food and bench racing with the other car folks who were always there late into the night.
Undeterred by the ticket, we went back to continue the "testing" for at least five more weeks. Vince knew a guy who got us tires every week because we'd start an evening with brand new tires and bring them back bald. We had to change tires every week before putting that little convertible back in the Tech Center cellar.
To fix the wheelhop situation, I built a set of traction bars that helped the car's starting-line performance. Unbelievably, the racing was so heavy back then that at some stoplights you could feel the buildup of rubber on the street like you'd find on the concrete starting line at a dragstrip. With that kind of traction, having a good suspension was critical. We got better with time, and that L88 proved to be a great-running car-and not a bad testbed for product development.
Those days of driving the L88 with Vince will always be one of my fondest memories. It's not bad when you get to have it all-a boss who likes what you like and the ability to build amazing cars like big-block Corvettes for a living.