Quarter-mile times are also available. Chevy claims both the base and Z51 package Corvette will complete the quarter mile in 11.2 seconds. The only wrinkle here is the respective cars’ speed at the end of the drag strip. The base car will be doing 123 mph, while the Z51 package car will be doing 121 mph. Chevy told us the lower final speed is entirely due to aerodynamics — the Z51 package adds a front splitter and rear spoiler that produces more downforce than the base Corvette, adding aerodynamic drag in the process.

For some comparison, the 2019 ZR1 ran to 60 mph in 2.8 seconds. That’s barely faster than even a base Corvette now.

Representatives from General Motors confirmed that the 40-day UAW autoworker strike caused the new Corvette's start-of-production date to move to February 2020. The car was initially expected to reach the driveways of waiting customers by the end of 2019.

GM also still had orders for the current front-engine C7 Corvette model to fill before the plant in Bowling Green, Ky., could switch over to the new car.

Once C7 Corvette production has officially completed, there will be a plant shutdown for an undetermined period to move out the old tooling and bring in the new.

PONTIAC, Mich. — Chevrolet lovingly refers to the LT2 in the 2020 Chevy Corvette as the “jewel” of the car. We don’t disagree. It’s a pretty engine, far prettier than any other base Small Blocks we’ve seen in Corvettes past. You can gaze upon the engine from the exterior of the car, too, so long as you haven’t bought the Convertible.

Chevy brought us to the GM Performance and Manufacturing Center in Pontiac, Michigan, to give us all the nitty gritty details about its “jewel,” and now we can share them with you. There’s a whole lot to discuss, so let’s get right into what Chevy did to make this engine worthy of living in the heart of the first mid-engine Corvette.

Despite similarities between the LT2 and the LT1, Chevy stresses heavily that “it isn’t the LT1.2. It’s the LT2.” Changing the name of something doesn’t always mean anything, but in this case, the new engine designation makes sense the more you look into it.

Everything started with the architecture of the car. Now that Chevy doesn’t have to worry about forward visibility over a big V8, it can take some liberties on how much space it’s using in the car. Of course, Chevy didn’t change the 6.2-liter displacement, but other things have changed. The intake manifold grew in height and volume, from 11.1 liters to 14.1 liters. All the intake runners are the same length as well, something that wasn’t geometrically possible with the LT1. This means more power at higher RPMs and general flow improvements — Chevy says it’s a 3 percent increase in performance over the old intake manifold.

The camshaft profile changed, as well. Exhaust valve lift is increased by 1 mm to 14 mm, making it exactly the same as the intake lift now. Additionally, Chevy says it increased both the intake and exhaust valve lift duration. These changes allow the added flow to be taken advantage of. This hasn’t resulted in a big, lopey cam sound on idle, though. Instead, Chevy says its new wide-range air-fuel sensor (WRAF) allows for improved idle stability to be smoother than even the LT1 was capable of. Apparently, you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Evacuating the exhaust gases is still massively important, and Chevy says it realized big gains in the LT2’s exhaust system. This system was a complete, ground-up redesign, for obvious reasons. New, fabricated four-into-one exhaust manifolds (that look like aftermarket headers) sweep upwards and into the pipes. The primary runners are “nearly identical in length,” measuring about 330 mm. Chevy claims a 1 percent increase in power over the LT1 header design.

New catalytic converters are further downstream. Chevy says it only uses one split-volume catalyst per bank now instead of the two-converter setup necessary with the LT1. The new WRAF allows for earlier light off of the catalyst, which ends up reducing tailpipe emissions by a whopping 25 percent. The single converter per bank setup also helps packaging and improves exhaust flow.

Chevy says it spent a great deal of effort and time perfecting the exhaust note you hear from the rear of the C8. It even went so far as to tell us they were willing to compromise on power if it meant a better noise coming from those quad exhaust tips. Trust us, the noise is magnificent in the way a Corvette should sound.

The LT1 had an available dry sump oil system, but the LT2’s is far superior. Chevy offered proof of this by saying it only managed to grenade one engine in the development process due to oil pressure loss, versus multiple LT1s facing their death in similar testing. What that means for owners is a more reliable lubrication system for track use.

Chevy says its testing indicated the dry sump system is capable of maintaining oil pressure at sustained lateral acceleration on track up to 1.25 g. You’ll be hard pressed to hit 1.25 g in a corner on any racetrack in a street car, and the only way you’d come close to that in the C8 is with stickier rubber than what Chevy fits at the factory. Far less oil than before is being thrown around and churned up with the revised system, and that’s ideal for track use. It also doesn’t need as much oil as the LT1’s dry sump system did. At 7.5 quarts of oil, it requires 2.25 quarts less, making the total system weight 3.3 pounds lighter.

Despite the C8’s LT2 being taller than the LT1, it sits lower in the car than before. Chevy managed to mount it 25 mm lower than the C7, improving the car’s center of gravity. And even though that Small Block is tucked a little further in there than before, you can still see gorgeous, painted rocker covers and attention to detail throughout the engine bay. The red rocker covers are especially noteworthy — the color is called Edge Red externally, but Chevy refers to them as “Venthan Red.” An engineer with the last name of Venthan designed them, but apparently the marketing team didn’t go for “Venthan Red” as the official name.

One last appearance item we’ll note is the addition of the Tonawanda pride badge. The original Small Block was built in Tonawanda, N.Y. (near Buffalo), and the LT2 is built there, too. Mark Reuss made a last-second decision to incorporate the retro badge onto the LT2 — it was originally used on Corvettes in the 1960s. We’re sure the good folks up in Tonawanda will love it.

So there you have it. The LT2 is capable of 495 horsepower and 470 pound-feet of torque with the Z51 package, and it’ll hit 60 mph from rest in 2.9 seconds. It’s tough to believe the base Corvette got that much faster overnight, but it did, and we can’t wait to start seeing it on the road once production starts in February 2020.

C8 Corvette Dyno Test Follow-Up: What Really Happened

Key parameters were botched, but the C8’s still plenty powerful

During its last day in our care, we put the C8 Corvette on a dynamometer and got some eye-opening results. It was a Mustang dyno we've used in the past that has generally provided reasonable results and which provided thoroughly believable numbers on a 2020 Ram 2500 with a Cummins later the same day. We had lots of trouble believing the numbers produced during this test, however, and so our bottom line was: "One thing we know for certain: The 2020 Chevrolet Corvette C8 provided for all our testing produces more power than what Chevy claims." Many of you have also written in to express your own "reservations." We've remained silent while conducting a thorough investigation, which is now complete.

Now we've learned that our dyno operator selected two dyno settings that were incorrect. One is a key parameter that had yet to be released for the C8 and so was estimated from C7 data. That is road-load horsepower at 50 mph. This factor incorporates friction and aero drag, and it can be measured empirically by conducting coast-down tests, but because dyno-testing the C8 was a last-minute fill-in to our schedule when Real MPG testing proved impossible on our last day with the C8, we had no opportunity to measure it. The dyno operators used 12.6, when Chevrolet has informed us that the correct factor for our Z51 should have been 15.4. But the bigger boo-boo was that the dynamometer was also set to assume all-wheel drive.

These two factors conspired make the dyno believe the Corvette's powertrain was overcoming way more inertia than it really was, which led to the inflated results. Sadly, there's apparently no way to virtually "rerun" the test in the computer with corrected parameters, so we simply must get another C8 back and run the test again.

But everyone's test numbers have been so impressive with this red Corvette that we still longed to find some proof of its actual horsepower, so we tried to extract some "road-dyno" pulls out of our best drag strip run by examining the acceleration from the upshift point to redline in second, third, and fourth gears. We computed the corrected time to each 1-mph increment from 46 to 55 mph in second, from 70 to 80 mph in third, and from 102 to 112 mph in fourth. Then by analyzing the car's acceleration rate between each of these mph points, given its mass and what we know about its aerodynamics, we backed out a rough estimate of the power at the wheels. These runs included the rpm at which the power peaks, but peak torque could not be estimated from these pulls.

The data point cloud was pretty widely dispersed, but all the pulls include data points above 450 hp, and with a bunch of smoothing we got a polynomial trend line that peaks at 425 hp just past 6,300 rpm (which, assuming 15 percent losses, comes in at 500 hp).

Then an opportunity presented itself to mount our test gear to a different Corvette at a different racetrack, one that included some relatively flat and level areas where we could run a proper "road dyno" pull from 1,500 rpm to redline in second and third gears. This testing occurred on a different (orange) Corvette Z51. Using our fanciest 100-Hz Vbox we measured very fine time-to-speed data that included the longitudinal g measurements. The second- and third-gear pull results were in remarkably close agreement: Horsepower at the wheels came out at roughly 395 hp at 6,250 rpm with torque at just under 350 lb-ft at about 4,300 rpm. Assuming our 15 percent crankshaft-to-wheels parasitic loss figure, this car comes in a shade under the rated output at 465 hp and 412 lb-ft.

Is this simply car-to-car variation? Does road-dyno testing involve too much uncertainty or speculation? We probably can't know until we test some more C8 Corvettes on the dynamometer and the drag strip. For now, let's just say we're convinced our red test car was certainly making every bit of its rated output of 495 hp at 6,450 rpm and 470 lb-ft at 5,150 if not slightly more. Stay tuned as this saga continues.

Some endings are bittersweet. The last #Corvette C7 – the end of an era – rolled off the line today.
It was previously auctioned for $2.7 million with proceeds going to building smart homes for veterans.

The Chevrolet C8 Corvette Stingray Is a Loss Leader

Chevy loses money on every sub-$80K C8 sold, a source tells us

The all-new mid-engine C8 Corvette's impressive $59,995 starting price is only good for the first year, as we reported back in August, and unless it goes up by $20,000, Chevrolet will continue to lose money on low-trim cars, a senior GM source tells MotorTrend.

We had a feeling the $59,995 starting price was too good to be true, and a GM source confirmed as much to us explaining the price would rise for the 2021 model year. This isn't much of a surprise, as the base price of a C7 rose nearly $2,000 in its second year and by another $2,000 the following year. While we still don't know how much the C8's price will rise in 2021, a more senior GM official tells us it would have to go through the roof in order to cover GM's cost.

According to our source, the original budget for the C8 project assumed a starting price of $79,995. This is certainly reasonable considering the enormous amount of work needed to redesign the car into a mid-engine configuration, but it's a huge jump from the C7. In order to keep customers from revolting, Chevy is taking it on the chin and willingly losing money on every C8 it sells for less than $80,000. No doubt a factor in the C8's laundry list of options and dress-up parts is the hope buyers will load up their cars with extras and turn their $60,000 Stingrays into $80,000-plus Stingrays. The C8 Stingray Z71 3LT we tested rang up at $88,305.

More critical are the base prices of upcoming performance variants including Z06 and ZR1. According to our source, the sweet spot for profit and volume is between $80,000 and $100,000. Once the car crests six figures, our source says, sales volume drops off precipitously. This will be a trick for Chevrolet, because the C7 Z06 starts at $82,990, which doesn't leave the company much room for an increase without upsetting customers and breaking out of the sweet spot in price and volume. The C7 ZR1, meanwhile, already starts at $135,090, so Chevrolet has more discretion to price the C8 ZR1 knowing full well it will be a low-volume car.