Pete Brock

At age 19, while still attending Art Center School, Brock became the youngest designer ever hired by General Motors' GM Styling design department. In November 1957, Brock drew the sketch (with genesis in the Merrill Powell designed Victress C2) which GM VP of Design Bill Mitchell picked to become the design of the next Corvette, the Corvette Stingray. As GM had made a commitment to not engage in racing (known as the AMA ban) Brock worked with Mitchell in 1958 in one of the design studios, creating the prototype of the Stingray racer. The production car was renamed the Sting Ray[1] and was released in 1963, almost 4 years after Brock had left GM.

Having turned 21, which allowed him to obtain his SCCA race license, Brock left GM in 1959 to return to California. In Detroit he'd been working on a mid-1950s Cooper that had run at Le Mans. Returning to California with the Cooper, he started working for Max Balchowsky at Max's Hollywood Motors shop during the day and worked on his race car at night. In 1961 Carroll Shelby and Paul O'Shea met at Riverside Raceway to discuss opening a driver's school. When Shelby and O'Shea got into a disagreement about who would work for who, O'Shea left. Shelby hired Brock as his first paid employee, running the Carroll Shelby School of High Performance Driving.[2] Brock worked at Shelby American until the end of the 1965 season on the Shelby American brand, creating the logos, merchandise, ads, and car liveries. He designed the Shelby components of the Shelby Mustang GT350s[2] and designed race cars for Shelby such as the Lang Cooper, Nethercutt Mirage, De Tomaso P70 and the Shelby Daytona Cobra coupes that won the FIA GT World Championship in 1965.[3]

In December 1965 Brock started his own design firm and motor racing team, Brock Racing Enterprises (BRE)[4] which worked with Hino, Toyota, and Datsun. GT cars Brock designed for BRE clients included the Hino Samurai, the Toyota JP6 and the Triumph TR-250K. Brock continued racing, now driving his own Lotus 11 MKII and paid rides with a TVR and Mercury in the NASCAR series. Brock began performance development on the Hino 900, which then evolved into their Hino 1300 Contessa. When Toyota took over Hino, Brock designed for them the JP6 Prototype. Toyota planned to give BRE several Toyota 2000GTs for use in Trans-Am racing, but when Toyota instead gave the cars to Carroll Shelby, Brock approached Datsun. BRE became the west coast Datsun factory race team and competed in 1969 in the SCCA DP class with Datsun 2000 roadsters, in 1970 and 1971 in the CP class with the 240Zs (SCCA National Champions '70-'71) and in 1971-72 the 2.5 Trans-Am Series races with the Datsun 510s[4] (National Champions '71-'72). The race team was disbanded at the end of the 1972 season when Brock moved on to hang gliding.

Brock founded Ultralite Products, which he built into the largest hang gliding company in the world, and developed the sport of long distance hang gliding competition.[5] He then left the company, citing dissatisfaction with liability laws, and returned to the automotive industry.

Brock became an instructor at his alma mater, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In the early 1990s he wrote a book on the Daytona Cobra Coupes, then worked for 21 years as a photojournalist, primarily covering endurance racing for automotive magazines. In 2013, he wrote Corvette Sting Ray: Genesis of an American Icon on the development of the 1963 Corvette.[2]

In 1999 Brock worked at the Hi-Tech company in Port Elizabeth, South Africa to create a modern version of Daytona Cobra Coupe, called the Brock Coupe. Over 150 Brock Coupes have been produced in South Africa and sold by Superformance, LLC (Superformance Replicars). He owns an example of the coupe (chassis #0073) painted Amulet Red with a Wimbledon White half-cove.

Brock now lives in Henderson, Nevada in the Las Vegas Valley area with his wife Gayle, working together as freelance automotive writers and racing photographers.

Brock also continues to design clay models of new automotive designs. In 2008, Brock designed an aerodynamic car trailer called the Aerovault, with aluminum construction.

Gayle runs the current day BRE operation which offers memorabilia from the 1960s and 1970s, builds the Aerovault car trailers and offers aftermarket parts and accessories for Datsuns and Daytona Coupe replicas.