(October 29, 2011) DETROIT — A legacy of racing competition runs deep in Chevrolet’s 100-year history, dating to co-founder Louis Chevrolet’s passion for racing automobiles.

An iconic brand in American motorsports, Chevrolet has won the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Manufacturers’ Championship 35 times, and is the most successful name in that series’ history. Chevrolet Corvette Racing has taken seven class trophies at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. A Chevrolet-branded V-8 racing engine won the Indy 500 seven times between 1988 and 2002.

As Chevrolet continues to define itself as a 21st Century global automotive leader, motorsports remain integral to the plan. The racing version of the Chevrolet Cruze, which since its 2009 debut has become the bowtie brand’s best-selling car globally, claimed the World Touring Car Championship (WTCC) Cup in 2010 and 2011, and is the first-ever General Motors-branded vehicle to win such honors in an FIA-organized series.

During the past 100 years, innumerable defining moments have shaped Chevrolet’s racing history. Here are three major milestones:

Novice racer Louis Chevrolet overtakes the great Barney Oldfield

Until May 20, 1905, Swiss-born and recent U.S. immigrant Louis Chevrolet was just another New York chauffeur. Given a chance that day to drive an underpowered Fiat in a timed event at the old hippodrome in Morris Park, he broke the great Barney Oldfield’s closed-course one-mile world record.

In 1906, Louis Chevrolet set a world land speed record of 117.64 mph at Ormond Beach, Florida.

On May 27, Chevrolet was back in the Fiat, this time in a head-to-head race against Oldfield and other daredevil drivers in a sport that had begun to captivate the country. He beat them all. It was front-page news in The New York Times. Next up was the Vanderbilt Cup, a road race on Long Island, where his dauntless driving brought him more notoriety.

By 1909, General Motors founder William C. “Billy” Durant had engaged Chevrolet, who in addition to being a renown racing driver had become an accomplished, if self-taught, mechanical engineer, to drive and help develop his Buick racing team’s cars.

After Durant lost control of General Motors in 1910, Durant and Chevrolet began talking about a new car-making adventure, which became the Chevrolet Motor Car Company on Nov. 3, 1911.

One hundred years later, it’s still not clear whether Durant wanted a car that his new partner was designing, or just his name. Thought Chevrolet soon left the company, his never-give-up competitive spirit permeates the brand to this day.

Chevrolet and the Indy 500: Two institutions forever linked

No car company has been more closely associated with the Indianapolis 500 race over the last 100 years than Chevrolet. Both institutions got their start in 1911.

In the early days, the three Chevrolet brothers, Louis, Arthur and Gaston, drove in the Indy 500, and the state-of-the-art machines they designed and built won back-to-back victories in 1920 and ’21. More recently, the V-8 racing engine that Chevrolet collaborated with England’s Ilmor Engineering to build in the 1980s won six consecutive 500s, and a brand-new 2.2L twin-turbo V-6 Indy engine is being prepared for 2012.

1989 Indy 500 winner
with Chevy-powered
race car.

However, Chevrolet and the Indy 500 may be most firmly linked in the public mind today by the 22 pace cars that have sported the bowtie badge since 1948, when a gray Fleetmaster convertible became the first Chevrolet to pace the Indianapolis classic.

Over the years, Chevrolet has found Indy to be an ideal venue for revealing new models and introducing significant product developments. Just as it did in 1967 to acquaint America with the new Camaro, Chevrolet used the 2009 race to showcase its all-new 2010 Camaro, which brought the nameplate back after a seven-year hiatus. 

Underdog Chevrolet shocks NASCAR at Darlington in 1955

Chevrolet’s performance reputation was virtually non-existent in the early 1950s, but when the first of the brand’s legendary small-block V-8 engines appeared in1955 models, perceptions quickly changed. Soon, word spread through the racing world that the new V-8 developed by Chevrolet’s Ed Cole and his engineers fairly bristled with performance potential.

The Chevrolet V-8 soon demonstrated its stock car racing potential, with several early 1955 season wins at short-track events. But the real break-out on the stock car front occurred at the important NASCAR Southern 500 race held at the Darlington, S.C. “super speedway” on Labor Day, 1955. There, driver Herb Thomas led a surprise Chevrolet rout that saw seven of the new V-8s finish in the Top 10.

Dale Earnhardt and his
#3 Monte Carlo

With the Darlington win, the Chevrolet V-8 came into its own, and NASCAR racing would never be the same. While the big and powerful larger cars that had previously dominated the circuit were shredding tires and losing engines that day, the nimble-but-rugged Chevrolets just kept on going. Although running with a smaller engine and less horsepower than the bigger cars, the Chevrolets were considerably lighter, which gave them better gas mileage — resulting in fewer pit stops. And the new cars shocked everybody by going the distance without tire changes.