Daniel Strohl tells this story about America’s sports car:

By the mid-1990s, Russ McLean had already worked for GM for many years – including stints in Spain and in Mexico – and developed a reputation as a cost-cutter and turnaround champ. That reputation led to his appointment as manager of the Corvette platform at a time when the fourth-generation Corvette was losing about $1,000 per car. At the time, McLean noted, GM suffered from a one-two punch of financial difficulties and continuous reorganization, so he decided to isolate the Corvette team from “all that noise.” By maintaining one stable organizational structure independent from the overall GM structure, he said he was able to make necessary changes – improving the Corvette’s quality and reducing overall costs – that in turn led to Corvette making a profit within McLean’s first year.

With the fourth-generation Corvette’s stability ensured, McLean believed his next task was to focus on developing the C5, which GM had already approved. However, a management change brought with it a new order from GM’s board of directors: Stop development on the Corvette and let it sunset. For somebody like McLean, who had bought a 1960 Corvette in 1962 and who believed in the Corvette, he couldn’t accept that order. So he ignored it.

“As a manager, I believed in doing the right things rather than doing things right,” McLean said. “The Corvette was always the innovation leader for General Motors and for the world, and that innovation flowed into so many other cars. So when somebody told me to let that icon die, I just couldn’t let that happen – it was not the right thing to do.”

He decided then and there not to tell his staff – or anybody else in the world, save for his wife – what his boss had ordered him to do. He kept the Corvette platform team running in silence, not asking permission for anything they did, and he avoided contact and communication with his boss and GM management. He continued the C5’s development as if nothing had happened and was able to launch it for the 1997 model year.

And he did indeed face repercussions for what he did. “I wasn’t considered a team player, I didn’t follow directions,” McLean said of his later evaluations. “Yes, I lost out on promotions after that.” In 1996, he left the Corvette team and in the fall of 2001 he left GM entirely. He bought a couple vintage Corvettes – a 1963 split-window fuelie and a 1958 airbox car – and settled into taking care of his aging parents and the family farm.

The definitive book on the creation of the fifth-generation Corvette is James Schefter’s All Corvettes Are Red. Schefter’s book covers the entire eight-year process that included repeated murder attempts. (To put it mildly, GM was a mess in the 1980s and 1990s, which differs from the 2000s and now … not much.) I don’t recall how much McLean was mentioned in Schefter’s book, which tells as much about the people who developed the C5 (including Corvette chief engineer Dave Hill and stylist Wayne Cherry and others) as the car itself.

What’s crazy to me is that GM would even momentarily consider killing a car that (1) brought people into dealerships and (2) made money for the company. (The Corvette has also for years introduced technologies that made their way to lesser GM models, but that’s less important to the bean-counters than the first two points.)

Of course, if there was no C5 Corvette …

… there wouldn’t have been (probably, anyway) a C6 …

… or (given what happened to GM in the late 2000s) a C7 today: