Aside from the muscle car war that had erupted here on the home soil, the 1960s saw another booming performance auto trend that involved a certain degree of multi-cultural component swapping, one like none that the world’s automotive market had ever seen. European coach builders like Italy’s own Bertone and Pinin Farina were old-time coach makers, but they were contemporary enough to know which drivetrains were the market’s best running and long-lasting.

Italian supercars like Ferrari and Maserati carried a mystique of sexiness as much during the ’50s and ’60s as they had during the ’80s and ’90s, but if there was anything that we learned from Scaglietti and the Corvette Italia, it’s that the durability of an American running gear was a tradition, like it was with the advanced shapes of car bodies in Europe, that just couldn’t be replaced by the exotic quality of the Euro taste.

True that Italian auto has pretty much always been on the cutting edge of style, but this doesn’t mean that the Old Country has always been famous for constructing the world’s most well-built engines. Formerly a Ferrari employee until leaving the Maranello automaker in 1961, Giotto Bizzarini went on to help design the chassis for one of Italy’s most famous, small-block powered sports cars.

A social worker by day, Hirman Bond is the owner of a rare, Vette-powered Iso Grifo. According to Autoblog’s Zach Bowman, Bond is very unlike most classic car collectors in relation to his Bowtie-driven exotic, “Unlike most collectors, Bond doesn’t have his ultra-rare Italian sealed away in a museum somewhere. No, he drives the car just about every week,” explains Bowman.

Making their Grand Touring debut in 1962, Iso built their very first Touring car that year, the Vette 327-powered Rivolta GT. One of the era’s most killer collaborations of Bertone’s decidedly sporty body styling and Bizzarini’s superior platform construction, the Rivolta GT would give birth to the next Chevy-Italian hybrid based on the Bizzarini chassis, the small-block stuffed Grifo A3/L that was built on a shortened version of the GT’s platform.

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Corvette may have had its own time with the likes of some of Italy’s oldest and most well-known coach builders, but the Italia and SV9 weren’t the only Euro-American hybrids to benefit from stout, GM performance. And if you think that the Pantera DeTomaso was the closest thing to a Ferrari to ever be built with an American V8, then take a ride in our featured video with enthusiast, Hirman Bond in his Chevrolet-fitted, Iso Grifo supercar!