A new Corvette is on its way, and Chevy isn’t about to let any competitors or prying eyes get a look at it. To make sure no says make their way into the facility to lay eyes on the new Corvette, they are closing their doors to visitors starting June 18th, and they will remain off limits to tourists for 18 months. No explanation was given, so let’s speculate wildly about the future of the Corvette.

1-1/2 years seems like a crazy amount of time to kill the tour program at the Bowling Green plant, but it’s also reasonable to believe that the plant is getting outfitted with the machines and tooling it needs to produce a mid-engine Corvette.

The production of the mid-engine Corvette has been in the air for decades, but spy photos have revealed a different looking Corvette in camo, being tested by GM lately. There’s also reason to believe that Chevy is moving away from the pushrod design, and adopting a free-revving DOHC engine. Working this into the mix would certainly be a reason Chevy would want to keep visitors out of the plant. Then there’s possibility of a C7 ZR1 going into production, and Chevy wanting to hide this from prying eyes.

We strongly believe that the truth is in the mix somewhere, or maybe it’s all happening at once — which would be a massive amount of change for the Corvette, so 18 months to go through all of those transformations suddenly doesn’t seem that long. In reality, the truth is probably somewhere in between ‘just’ a new model coming out, and three major changes happening for the Corvette line.