An American Car Rocked The Flat-Six A Decade Before the Porsche 911 Turbo

Edward Nicholas Cole, also known as Ed Cole, is one of the most influential minds in automotive history. Although Cole has a laundry list of accolades across his long and illustrious career at General Motors, one of his most defining moments was beating Porsche to the punch in developing the first production rear-engine turbocharged flat-six vehicle. Porsche introduced the first production turbocharged Porsche 911 model in 1975, the 930 Turbo.

Yet, thirteen years earlier, it was Chevrolet that debuted the 1962 Chevrolet Corvair Monza Spyder, featuring its rear-mounted air-cooled 2.4-liter turbocharged flat-six engine. In the 1960s, GM was a global leader in innovation and groundbreaking engineering developments thanks to the brilliance of Ed Cole, who served in many prominent roles within GM from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s. This is the story of how and why Cole and GM pioneered rear-engine flat-six turbocharging well before Porsche.

To give you the most up-to-date and accurate information possible, the data used to compile this article was sourced from various manufacturers and other authoritative sources.

Why GM Was Breaking All The Rules In The Post-War Era

There is no era of American automotive history more pivotal than the 1960s, and one of this special era’s greatest architects was Ed Cole. From the beginning, it was clear that Cole was destined for greatness and cut from a different cloth than most of his era. At the turn of the 20th century, Cole was a farm kid in Michigan who already displayed an impressive business and engineering aptitude, operating his own homebrew radio set business as a child.

His mechanical inclinations would lead him to General Motors Institute in 1930, where he was a standout student who would eventually be scouted and sponsored by Cadillac. Cole’s progress through the ranks of GM’s corporate structure was impressive, and by 1943, he was Cadillac’s chief industrial designer. Soon after, Cadillac would entrust Cole to design the company’s first post-war V-8 engine in 1949.

Cole Took GM By Storm In The 1950s

Cole’s success and power would magnify significantly during the 1950s, when he became the chief engineer of Chevrolet in 1952. This move paid massive dividends for GM as it was at this time that Cole designed the now iconic small-block Chevy V-8 (or SBC), the most prevalent V-8 engine of all time. With every new project and every passing year, Cole was hitting home runs. The progress between the Cadillac V-8 and the SBC was massive despite the relatively short timeframe between their developments, and the new landmark Chevrolet V-8 improved every aspect of durability, quality, and performance.

Cole’s Vision Expands As Chevrolet General Manager

The immediate success of the small-block Chevy put Cole’s reputation at an all-time high, leading to his promotion to general manager of Chevrolet in 1956. Cole was a brilliant engineer and had amazing business sense, but this position provided a new level of challenge he hadn’t yet faced. Chevrolet, at the time, had great success, but it was Cole’s job to launch GM to the next level of dominance.

Chevy, back then, focused on larger cars, but Cole was convinced they should also expand their reach to smaller and affordable cars that were becoming increasingly popular thanks to global success like the Volkswagen Beetle. It was the fundamental design of imported vehicles like the Volkswagen Beetle and Porsche 911 that would inspire Cole to pursue his most daring and radical project yet, the air-cooled rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair.

The Chevy Corvair Was The Anti-Thesis Of American Engineering

Ed Cole’s famous motto was “kick the hell out of the status quo.” Conventionality was a sin for enigmatic minds like Cole’s, and he set out to create an undeniable impact with every one of his initiatives as one of GM’s top brass. If Chevy’s primary rivals, Ford and Chrysler, had their minds set on a specific engineering solution, Cole was guaranteed to provide a well-structured dissenting opinion. The Chevy Corvair was the pure embodiment of that dissent packed into the shape of an utterly unique and affordable compact American car.

The Origins Of The “Compact” Car

With Cole’s promotion and his influence reaching new heights in 1956, the sky was the limit for Chevy’s intrepid leader. Cole understood that the excesses of the 1950s would soon come to an end and affordable compact cars would grow in response. The first post-war American “compact” car, the 1950 Nash Rambler, proved to be recession-proof because the selling point was its affordability, a rare quality that quelled the fears of cautious, spending-adverse consumers. Yet, what automakers also soon realized is that many consumers were buying these smaller, more economical models, like the Volkswagen Beetle, as a secondary alternative vehicle to their main larger daily drivers.

By the late 1950s, all the major players in the domestic market had caught on to the growing impact of this market trend, as each proceeded to debut their take on the “compact” car. Ford debuted the Ford Falcon and Plymouth debuted the Plymouth Valiant as their solutions to the compact car segment. Both of these rival cars are designed based on scaled-down versions of existing cars. However, Chevy’s answer to the same problem, the Chevrolet Corvair, was a lot different from either.

German Import Cars Inspired The Chevy Corvair

Instead of being built from a scaled-down variant of an existing chassis, the Chevy Corvair was based on the 1954 Chevrolet Corvair concept car that shared styling elements with the C1 Chevrolet Corvette. Yet, it was on the inside and beneath the sheet metal where the Corvair demonstrated that this was no cookie-cutter vehicle and certainly not a modified Corvette chassis. Cole allowed his engineers free rein as far as concepts, so no idea was too radical. One of those outlandish prototypes featured a rear-engine horizontally opposed air-cooled engine in a modified Porsche body (and the rest was history).

GM Ushers A New Era And The Dawn Of Turbocharging

Despite all the doubts and uncertainty, the Chevy Corvair debuted in the 1960 model year and was a smash hit. By the end of the year, Ed Cole’s smiling face and the characteristic design of the Chevy Corvair would be featured on the October 5, 1959, cover of Time Magazine, along with the copy: “Two cars in every garage? Detroit’s compacts arrive.”

The Chevy Corvair’s rear-engine, horizontally opposed, air-cooled aluminum flat-six engine in a relatively small chassis marked the beginning of an entirely different thought process in American automotive design. Although this unique layout had never been attempted before in a production American vehicle, Porsche had already been refining this distinct design since their first production model, the Porsche 356 (the predecessor to the Porsche 911) in 1948. Yet, where Ed Cole and Chevrolet actually beat Porsche to the punch was in production turbocharging with the release of the Monza Spyder variant of the Chevy Corvair in 1962.

The First Rear-Engine Turbocharged Air-Cooled Flat-Six

Two years after the debut of the Corvair, Chevy broke convention again by launching the Monza Spyder model. This factory turbocharged variant would be the second production vehicle offering a turbocharger as a factory option (the first being the 1962 “Turbo-Rocket” Oldsmobile Jetfire, offering the first production turbocharged V-8 engine). The turbocharged Corvair Spyder would make 150 horsepower and 230 pound-feet of torque, eclipsing the base model Corvair’s 80-horsepower Turbo-Air flat-six engine.

Chevrolet Corvair Monza Spyder Specs

The turbocharged variant of Chevy’s flat-six was initially dubbed the “Super Charged Spyder” engine, and it was heavily modified to meet the increased demands of turbocharging. This included components such as:

• Rod and Main Bearings
• Upper Piston Rings
• Nickel/Chromium Alloy Exhaust Valves
• Forged 5140 Chrome-Steel Crankshaft
• Reduced 8.0:1 compression ratio
• Single-side-draft Carter YH carburetor
• TRW 76mm turbocharger

How A Turbocharged Engine Doesn’t Blow Up Without An ECU

Nowadays, we have the luxury of hyper-intelligent computers that optimize every atom of fuel and air in your engine. However, back in 1962, color TVs were a luxury, and the majority of car owners had no idea what a turbocharger system was. So how exactly did you control boost output and not make your engine spontaneously explode when all you had for “tuning” was a carburetor and timing advance? Well, the less you have, the smarter you have to be.

Chevy designed the exhaust system of the Corvair to create a back-pressure system that would limit the maximum boost output of this specific TRW turbocharger to only 10 psi. When the engine demanded max fuel (during full throttle), the carburetor utilized a metering rod that would select a different jet that allowed for additional fuel in this high-demand condition. This prevented potential detention as a result of a lean mixture.

The static timing advance of the engine was also set very aggressively to ensure maximum power; thus, a diaphragm in the distributor could retard timing according to the pressure condition of the manifold. It may sound silly now, but back then, this was genius-level engineering. While the Chevy Corvair may have had its legacy tainted in the end, during the 1960s, the Corvair was a renegade of design that defied all standards of convention thanks to the intriguing mind of Ed Cole.