First Look at the 2023 C8 Corvette Z06

Sep. 30, 2021 – The excitement about the C8 Corvette never seems to die down, even from when it was first conceived. Since its debut to the world on July 18,2019, the C8 Corvette has been a revolutionary car for the brand, as it is the first mid-engined Corvette in history. But one question asked by every automotive enthusiast in existence is whether or not a C8 Corvette Z06 was going to be released. And in true Chevrolet fashion, they answered, and on Tuesday, October 26th, they’ll debut it.

The new C8 Corvette Z06 pictures and videos have circulated the internet showing a heavily camouflaged Z06, but Chevrolet has decided to give the masses a visual taste of what this monstrosity of a vehicle is going to look like.

A naturally-aspirated 5.5-liter V8 will power the mid-engined sports car, capable of pushing out over 600 horsepower at an incredibly high RPM, somewhere between 8500 and 9000. Judging by past Z06 packages and shots of the camouflaged variants, the Chevy will most likely come with a larger wing, suspension upgrades, carbon ceramic brakes, and more. Stay tuned for the release to learn more about the Z06!

Chevrolet’s First 2020 Corvettes Fresh off the Kentucky Assembly Line

Feb 3, 2020 – The Vettes are coming. Today, the much anticipated 2020 Corvette Stingray has begun regular production in GM’s Kentucky plant. The new addition to the Corvette family made waves with its (not-so-new) mid-engine format. If you’re not sure what we mean by that, check out our article on the original mid-engine Corvette concept. The new mid-engine Corvette c8 boasts 495 hp and 470 lb-ft of torque coming from the new LT2 6.2L small block V8. With this beefy power plant and fighter jet inspired body, these new Vettes are going to be breaking necks soaring down the highway very soon. Dealers are expecting shipments as soon as late February or early March.

More images of the new Corvette in case you haven’t seen how sweet this thing looks:

The 24 Hours Du Le Mans

Toyota Wins The Ultimate Sports Car Endurance Race

We Americans and Brits have a huge affinity with Le Mans, a small town three hours south west of Paris, France, down the Loire Valley that is the home of the annual 24 Heures (Hours) Du Le Mans sports car endurance race. I’ve been going on and off for more than 30 years, sometimes on the spectator side of the fence but more often on the other side with teams such as Richard Lloyd Racing, Panoz, Jaguar and McLaren. Any big international race is a buzz but there’s something quite special about Le Mans.

The race was started in 1923 by the Automobile Club de l’Ouest (of the West) and remains the world’s oldest active endurance race that is part private circuit and part public street course, that aside from a few safety-related alterations, has remained much the same since its inauguration. Indeed, you can drive down the Mulsanne straight on a normal, non-race day. Mulsanne is also known in French as Hunaudières, where it was quite incredible to have breakfast while cars were shrieking by at well over 200 mph. Unfortunately, modern safety requirements have sadly put an end to that experience. Nevertheless, Le Mans remains way up there on the list of amazing auto races.

Because of their sports car history, the Brits were early participants and the Americans weren’t far behind with a Stutz and a Du Pont in 1929. However, it was in 1950 when Cadillac first raced ‘Le Monstre’ there with Briggs Cunningham running a two-car team. Despite 10^th and 11^th place finishes, the Cads were well received. The press congratulating the Americans for their “skill, sportsmanship and dauntless good humor.”

Unfortunately, in 1955 a terrible accident resulted in the deaths of 84 people, including one driver, and injuring almost 200. As a result, Mercedes retired from the race. There followed an international ban on racing, and in the US, the AAA disbanded their Contest Board and more or less banned racing—for a few years at least.

“I think I must have counted every single shift that I did for the last two or three hours of the race.“Jim Busby

After a suitable period of mourning, racing resumed and in the mid-sixties Ford famously went after Ferrari and famously smoked them with their first overall win in 1966. Ford won three more times and the memorable 1-2-3 win came in 1968.

The other big Le Mans story was Steve McQueen’s seminal movie Le Mans filmed during the 1970 race and released the following year. The movie cost $7.6 million and took in a paultry $5.5. It’s not a great movie as movies go but it is for a car nut and gives a realistic insight into endurance racing. Try to imagine driving flat out in the dark and the rain hour after hour.

Of course, no matter what side of the fence you have been on, everybody has different memories of the race. For example, I recently interviewed Jim Busby who raced there many times and won five times. Jim has very different memories, for example, driving the night shift in pouring rain as the sun came up. He’s barreling down the Mulsanne straight at more than 200 mph. He couldn’t see for fog, well, he thought it was fog. “As, I got into it I could smell bacon and eggs.” Said Jim. “What I thought was fog was actually smoke from all the camp fires and stoves lit by the spectators cooking breakfast. The smell made me hungry and drove me nuts as we still had about eight hours to go.”

Jim also talked about a failing gearbox saying, “Coming down the Mulsanne, I’m thinking to myself, I’ve got two downshifts here, shall I make ’em both? Or shall I skip a gear and save the synchromesh. I think I must have counted every single shift that I did for the last two or three hours of the race.” I guess that’s why Le Mans is the ultimate endurance race.

This year’s event was exciting as ever with factory teams pitted against privateers, Chevy versus Ford versus Ferrari and adramatic, unexpected finale. For hours it looked like the Toyota Gazoo LMP1 team of Brit Mike Conway, Kamui Kobyashi of Japan and Argentina’s Jose Maria Lopez driving the #7 car were going to take the trophy after leading for most of the race in their TS050 hybrid. Unfortunately, they suffered a puncture an hour before the end and pitted for a tire change. As sod’s law would have it, the wrong tire was installed and they had to pit again to change it, which caused them to drop back to second behind their teammates. As a consequence of this mishap, the Toyota #8 team of two-time Formula One champion Fernando Alonso, Japanese driver Kazuki Nakajima and Sebastian Buemi of Switzerland took the win. It was 37-year-old Alonso’s second win and rumor has it that that mishap was organized so that Alonso’s team won. Third place went to Mikhail Aleshin, Stoffel Vandoorne and Vitaly Petrov driving the BR Engineering BR1-AER.

Over in the LMGTE Am class (Grand Touring Endurance Amateur), Ford took its second GT win with the #85 Keating Motorsports team of Jeroen Bleekemolen, Texas car dealer Ben Keating and Brazilian Felipe Fraga. Although they were given a penalty for peeling out in the pits, they stormed on to beat the #56 Porsche 911 RSR of Team Project 1 and the #84 Ferrari 488 GTE of JMW Motorsport that came in third. Unfortunately, the two Corvettes, #63 and #64 running in GTE Pro, despite putting on a strong effort for its 20^th continuous entry, fell behind due to a crash for #64 and a late-race spin and crash for #63 that resulted in some suspension damage.

“Racing needs an uplifting feel good story… “John Hotchkis Jr.

Unfortunately, the Ford entry was disqualified post-race for breaking a minimum refueling time limit and for having a 96.1-liter tank rather than the regulation 96-liter tank. Those infractions gave the win to the #56 Porsche. Now, you might be of the opinion that a mere 0.1 of a liter of extra fuel is nothing to quibble about but multiply that by multiple refuelings and you have a distinct advantage over the competition. It just goes to show that you need to be at the very top of your game if you want to win Le Mans.

John Hotchkis Jr., of Hotchkis Sport Suspension, who supplied most of the photographs used here, raced under the Wynn’s banner with his father at Le Mans in 1989.   His father and Bob Kirby brought Wynn’s to Le Mans in 1977.  Hotchkis Jr said, “I designed the Wynn’s livery that caught current Wynn’s driver/team owner Ben Keating’s attention when I was at Art Center College in 1986 and it ​was first used on the IMSA Hotchkis Racing Porsche 962 in 1987. We ran with Wynn’s sponsorship at Le Mans five times until 1989. This is the first time Wynn’s has been back to Le Mans in 30 years and the ultimate result was a real downer.Racing needs an uplifting feel good story, especially with the controversial overall result, and that finish was good story.”

As usual, more than 250,000 spectators turned out for the 87^th running of Le Mans and, as usual, it didn’t disappoint. Indeed, as is viewed as the “Burning Man’ of motorsports. For more info on Le Mans visit www.europeanlemansseries.com

Vette Dreams: The Mid-Engine Corvette

The concept of a Corvette with the engine mounted amidships is nothing new, back in 1960 Zora Arkus-Duntov, the so-called  ‘Father of the Corvette’, unveiled Chevrolet Engineering Research Vehicle 1 (CERV I). Not so much a Corvette as a Corvette-powered, open-wheel racing car that served as Duntov’s Corvette test bed.

Sold for $1.32 million in 2017, CERV I was followed in 1962 by not unsurprisingly, CERV II, a far more realistic, full-bodied car that could easily have been badged a Corvette. Built to combat Ford’s GT40 program, CERV II was the first mid-engined car in the world to be equipped with full-time, four-wheel drive. It was powered by a 3-valve, 377 ci, all-aluminum V8. It could be geared to accelerate from zero to 60 mph in less than three seconds or show a top speed of 200 mph. Incidentally, there was another mid-engine concept shown around the same time that it was often mistaken for CERV II. It had Corvette GS-II badging and is recognizable by its clear acrylic injector stacks. According to Duntov, this was a stillborn concept produced by Chevrolet R&D (there’s an R&D badge behind the cockpit).

Despite numerous setbacks, Duntov pushed for a no-compromise Corvette that in his language meant mid-engine. Help came in the person of GM’s new president Ed Cole and there followed a string of mid-engine concepts that sadly never went into production.

A very swoopy, Jetsons-style coupe…

The first, dubbed, Astro 1, appeared in 1967 and employed many race car and safety-oriented features such as energy-absorbing bumpers, adjustable steering column, adjustable pedals, inertia-reel seat belts, roll-over protection, and an anti-surge fuel tank in one sill member. A very swoopy, Jetsons-style coupe, Astro 1 had a two-piece fiberglass body and was powered by a hopped-up, OHC Corvair flat six. It stood a mere 35.5 inches tall.

The following year, Astro II, now code-named XP-880 appeared. Sometimes blue and sometimes red, Astro II utilized a Lotus-style backbone monocoque chassis fitted with a Pontiac Tempest transaxle and the OHC Corvair boxer engine.

By now, Duntov was getting into his stride and there followed two concepts both codenamed XP-882. The expensive Corvair engine was replaced by a transverse mounted V8 with a chain, yes chain-driven, Turbo-Hydromantic connected to a stock Corvette rear end via a short, right-angled driveshaft. Stylishly finished in silver, the project was sound but new general manager John Z. DeLorean squashed the program as being impractical and expensive.

XP-882, however, was far from dead and in 1972 one of the two cars resurfaced renamed XP-895. The basic, chain-driven powertrain was retained but the Reynolds Aluminum Company added a new, all-aluminum body in an effort to extol its weight-saving virtues. The concept never reached production but XP-895 survives.

A year later, the second XP-882 reappeared fitted with a new, aerodynamic skin, gull-wing doors and a 585 ci four-rotor rotary engine. It produced 350 hp at 7,000 rpm. Unfortunately, the 1973 oil crisis put paid to most performance cars for the foreseeable future. Duntov said the fuel consumption was about 6 mpg.

…the 1973 oil crisis put paid to most performance cars for the foreseeable future.

It took until the mid-80s for the auto industry to recover the energy crunch and in 1986 Corvette debuted a new mid-engine concept tagged Corvette Indy. Here, the story gets a little murky as GM likes to keep a blanket on the inside story of its concept cars. The first Indy, a fiberglass mock-up, was apparently designed by GM’s head of design Chuck Jordan and built in Turin, Italy in just seven weeks.

At the time, GM owned Lotus so the second Indy, a running prototype finished in white, was built at Hethel, England in 1987 and featured a Lotus-engineered DOHC V8. There was no official word on the Indy until the following year, 1989, when a red, fully operational car appeared in Warren, MI. It was powered by the said DOHC, 32-valve, sequentially fuel-injected, aluminum V8 code named 350/32. It was not dissimilar from the Lotus-developed and Mercury Marine-built LT5 about to debut in the Corvette ZR-1.

Supposedly developed specifically for the transverse application, 350/32 featured pent-roof combustion chambers, chain-driven cams, self-adjusting hydraulic valves, and a hydraulic chain tensioner. The induction system employed 16 runners with 16 Rochester Multec fuel injectors. Painted blue, CERV III, the third and final car in this series was powered by a 650 hp twin-turbo LT5. It had AWD, three differentials and Lotus-developed active suspension with microprocessor-controlled hydraulics to eliminate conventional shocks and springs—remember, this was 1988 and by now the CERV acronym stood for Corporate Experimental Research Vehicle.

Despite much ballyhoo around CERV III, there were still no plans for a production mid-engine Corvette. However, almost 60 years on from the original CERV I, perhaps all that is about to change and Duntov can finally rest easy.