Found & Restored Harley Earl Corvette Prototype S.O. 2151 Not Seen Since 1954!!

Take a look at this, Found & Restored Harley Earl Corvette Prototype S.O. 2151 Not Seen Since 1954!!

How many cars of significance are still out there, unidentified and undocumented to the wider collector car world? How long can they remain hidden before somebody has to trumpet their treasure?

“This car was stripped, and I mean it was stripped in the 1950s,” Billy Jay Espich said. How does anybody do that to a real Corvette prototype?

Stamped “S.O. 2151,” on a plate under the hood, this was the “Proposal Car” for the 1955 Corvette. S.O. stands for “Shop Order,” and in early 1954, Harley Earl’s famous “Art & Colour Section” saw the pale yellow body of Motorama show car EX-129 mounted to a 1954 chassis with engine and running gear.
EX-129 was one of the one-piece, pre-production bodies, and it was common practice back then to use one body for multiple jobs. Their mission was to create the Proposal Car for management to view what the 1955 model should look like, the first Corvette with a V-8.

In this age of social media and oversharing, it’s surprising that we’d still see cars resurfacing today, but that’s exactly what appears to have happened with S.O. 2151, a pre-production first-generation Corvette that Harley Earl’s Art and Colour Department made some styling changes to sometime around 1954.

Reportedly unseen in public for decades, it’s recently been restored after intensive research into its origins, as we see in this video that automotive author and photographer Jerry Heasley put together.

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