Stirling Moss, Juan Manuel Fangio and the most hated car in America

Rear-engined cars had already been adopted around the world when the Chevrolet Corvair first appeared in the United States, but the new technology left Americans concerned about the implications — and some strange crashes quickly resulted in hundreds of lawsuits.

When it came time for General Motors to defend itself in court, the company knew the best way to prove the safety of its Corvair would be to turn to the motorsport world. And that meant Formula 1 stars Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss headed to testify in court.

Formula 1 stars go to bat for the Chevy Corvair

Introduced in 1959 for the 1960 model year, the Chevrolet Corvair was a show-stopper right from the start. The General Motors sub-brand, inspired by the sporty machines filtering in from Europe, debuted its first mass-produced rear-engined car at the start of a new decade — and it was a hit right out of the gate largely because it was so cheap.

Big automotive publications at the time did note that the car needed a little improvement in the handling department, but that it was otherwise a strong piece of machinery.

The problem was that the car seemed to increasingly become involved in strange, single-car accidents. If those accidents were happening exactly as the victims claimed, then they were happening at low speeds, and they were resulting in multiple deaths and serious injuries.

Lawsuits soon emerged, and the key lawyer in charge — a man named David Harney — argued that it wasn’t any single part in the car that was causing issues. Rather, he claimed that General Motors had designed an inherently flawed car, and that it knew the car was flawed when it released it to the public.

That was a strong allegation, and it meant that GM couldn’t simply settle the lawsuits out of court: Doing so would mean that GM was effectively admitting it had in fact intended to build a faulty car.

Instead, Chevrolet and GM would need to defend itself in court. But to do so, it would need to draw on the racing world.

This story is a tie-in to Elizabeth Blackstock’s podcast, “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys.” Her latest episode centers on the lawsuits surrounding the Chevrolet Corvair, and how General Motors relied on the racing world to defend itself in court.

More “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys” tie-ins

👉 When F1 legend Juan Manuel Fangio was kidnapped at gunpoint in Cuba

👉 Palace revolt: Did Enzo Ferrari’s wife cause a Formula 1 walk-out in 1961?

General Motors struck up a deal with Chaparral Cars, a small Texas-based race team primarily involved in the Can-Am championship and other forms of endurance racing. Chaparral founder Jim Hall hailed from an engineering background and had become one of the most inspiring and innovative designers in the sport — adding wings and ground effect to race cars long before anyone else had done so.

The Chaparral crew was in charge of putting the Corvair through its paces down at its headquarters in Midland, Texas, and to test plenty of other similar machines to see if the Corvair was inherently more dangerous than similar front-engined cars.

It was Chaparral that built up the bulk of the data that Chevy used in court — but to really drive its point home, General Motors brought two Formula 1 legends into court in the 1965 to testify on its behalf: Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss.

Fangio and Moss were smart calls. Not only were they internationally recognized names, but they had personally experienced the move from front- to rear-engined cars and intimately understood the handling benefits that came from the rear-engined configuration.

While I haven’t gotten my hands on the actual transcripts of the court cases, author George Levy did so for his book Texas Legend: Jim Hall and His Chaparrals. Moss seemed to be the chattier of the two in court.

To illustrate that, I want to pull a section from the DPTJ episode:

If you know anything about Stirling Moss, you probably know his formidable wit was a significant reason for both his success and popularity. That came into full force when Moss was being cross-examined by Harney about the stability of the Corvair and its primary competitor, the Ford Falcon on the skidpad. Both had demonstrated that at about 0.6g, they’d begin to lose control.

Harney asked Moss, “When you were driving the Falcon and it reached approximately 0.6g, did it become stable as it went out of the skidpad circle?”

Moss, obviously miffed, replied, “Point-five-six, whatever. It was stable to the point that it ‘went off’ the way it was pointing, if you call that stable, yes.”

Harney asked, “By definition, sir, isn’t that stability in an understeering car when it leaves the arc? It becomes stable?”

To which Moss retorted, “Sir, it depends, if I may, what you call stable. If you are going to have an accident, whether you go to it stably without veering — this to me is not stability. My idea of stability is when I am in complete control of the car. Once I lose control, up, down, or sideways, the car is not stable in my mind. It is out of control.”

As it turned out, the Ford Falcon had lost control at 0.5g, while the Corvair held on until 0.6g. But the key point of Moss’ argument was that he completely tore down Harney’s argument that there was a “stable” way to go out of control.

When the first case was passed over to the jury on August 11, 1965, it took just four hours for the 12 jury members to clear GM of all responsibility.

That was just one of hundreds of lawsuits filed against GM regarding the Corvair, but it set a strong precedent for the remaining cases still to be decided, particularly thanks to the authoritative heft of the testimonies from Moss and Fangio.

Unfortunately for GM, no amount of testimony could clear the Corvair in the court of public opinion, and the machine ultimately faded away, leaving behind a legacy as America’s most hated car.

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