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Forty-four years ago, almost to the month, a breathtaking new type of American car was unveiled to the public. The venue was the glamorous traveling road show known as the General Motors Motorama: a huge display of dream cars rolled out before panting audiences from sea to shining sea. There, in turquoise and coral paint schemes, with rocketlike fender shapes and vast acres of chrome was GM's vision of our automotive future.

The overwhelming favorite among the glitzy cadre was a white two-seat ragtop called Corvette. Named after a British fighting ship, the sexy roadster wore a fiberglass body atop its shortened passenger-car frame. Under the hood was Chevy's best powerplant at the time: a rudimentary 150-horsepower inline-six connected to a two-speed automatic transmission. General Motors had no intention of putting the Corvette-or any of its other turntable teasers-into production as-is, but the public response to this youthful sportster was so strong, the automaker had to relent.

Within six months, on June 30, 1953, the first of 300 Corvettes to be built that inaugural year rolled out of a hastily constructed assembly facility in Flint, Michigan, and into automotive history. On July 2, 1992, the one millionth Corvette was produced.

It's at first difficult to appreciate how all-new the '97 Corvette is. "All-new" is a term that's bandied about with reckless abandon among automotive publicity teams, and often means little more than fresh body shaping over the existing powertrain and structure. So, consider this: Of the approximately 3000 parts that make up the '97 Corvette, only a handful of minor pieces, such as fasteners, are shared with the previous-generation car. In a nutshell, that means the C5 comes to market with a new, more rigid chassis design; a new, more powerful engine design; a new, more commodious interior and cargo bay; a new, more aerodynamic body; and much, much more. About the only thing that isn't new is the price: Chevy insiders tell us it will be remarkably close to that of the '96 model. That's unprecedented in Corvette history.

Corvettes are as much about heritage as about innovation, but that makes it doubly tough to design a world-beating new model. The dilemma of what to keep, what to dump, and what to resurrect was a brain twister that Chief Engineer Dave Hill, Chief Designer John Cafaro, and the rest of the Corvette Team wrestled with during every waking moment for the past several years. In-depth surveys of current Vette owners demonstrated that the new car must be innovative, yet still "look like a Corvette," while surveys of competitive-model owners told the Team unequivocally that the C5 should embody significant changes throughout.

And there are myriad other parameters a new design must fulfill: safety, aerodynamics, ease of manufacture, ease of repair, and bottom-line profitability, to name just a few. All of this makes staying true to heritage that much more difficult.

Take a close look at the Corvette's body shaping and you'll see four decades of styling legacy melding with current innovations: The front end retains hideaway headlights in the theme of those first used on the '63 model, the doors and front fenders are coved in reference to the '56-62 Corvettes (now as engine-compartment heat extractors), the fastback rear glass shape harks back to the '78 (25th anniversary) model, the trademark four taillights trace their heritage to '61, and, of course, the body is fashioned of a composite material, though here it's a flexible sheet-molded compound, rather than conventional fiberglass.