The Chevy Super Sport is among Detroit’s most storied performance nameplates and it has tantalized members of the Bowtie Brigade for more than 60 years. The SS moniker came to prominence thanks to the efforts of two of General Motors’ most iconic heroes: “Father of the Corvette” Zora Arkus-Duntov and one of the fathers of the muscle car, Semon “Bunkie” Knudsen. The first car to officially carry an SS badge was a one-off 1957 Corvette show car built by Duntov and his team to explore the competition potential of the Vette platform. It debuted at the New York Auto Show in December 1956 and made some demonstration test runs at the Sebring 12-hour race a few weeks later. It also served to introduce the Rochester Ram Jet fuel-injected 283 to the world that would debut in production Chevys later that year. But it was never put into production and the Super Sport name it introduced would lie fallow for another four years.
The man responsible for bringing a Super Sport Chevy to production—and for making it a performance icon—was Bunkie Knudsen. Fresh off his success reinventing Pontiac’s performance image, Knudsen was promoted to General Manager of Chevrolet in 1961 with a mandate to do the same for the Bowtie brand. His very first action was to introduce a mid-year sporty option package for the freshly redesigned ’61 Impala. For a name, he cribbed off Duntov’s paper and revived “Super Sport.” He followed much the
