Born in Belgium in 1909, Duntov began racing motorcycles and cars when he was 18 and parlayed that interest into a degree in mechanical engineering from the Institute of Charlottenberg in Berlin. He, his wife, and brother fled Europe in 1939, settling in New York, where he and his brother engineered and produced the Ardun hemispherical overhead-valve cylinder heads for the flathead Ford V-8. As legendary as the Ardun heads became, he and his brother couldn’t sell enough to remain in business, so in 1950 Duntov went to work for Sydney Allard, both to assist in producing Allard’s Ford-engined sports cars and to race them. From 1952 to 1955, Zora drove in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the first two years in Allards and the latter two in Porsches.

 

In 1952, Duntov returned to New York, where, a year later, he visited the Motorama at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to see the new Corvette. That encounter inspired him to write a letter to Chevrolet’s Ed Cole, who in turn hired Duntov as an assistant staff engineer. Duntov, who eventually became the Corvette’s chief engineer, made it his mission at GM to turn the Corvette into a true sports car; to that end, he pushed for the small-block Chevrolet V-8 to replace the Corvette’s six-cylinder engine.

Late in 1955, before the name “Corvette” became a household word signifying America’s sports car, a young Russian-born Chevrolet engineer named Duntov was toiling away almost anonymously in an effort to make his leftover factory mule into a record-breaker. Over a year earlier, Chevrolet Chief Engineer and three-time Indy 500 winner Mauri Rose had Daytona legend Smokey Yunick install an experimental V-8 engine into a 1954 Corvette test mule, which was given the factory designation EX87. When its testing duties were completed, it was given to Zora Arkus Duntov at Chevrolet Engineering to prepare for a high-speed record run at Daytona Beach.