5 Genuinely Impressive "Flaws" Of The C8 Corvette

Hello everyone and welcome, as you can see I am sitting inside a cutout of a c8 Corvette and at the same time sitting next to a functional c8 Corvette. In this video, we will discuss five aspects of the new Corvette that, at first glance, might You will be disappointed to hear the fact that it breaks by wire, that its braking distance is worse than the Corvette C7, that it understeers, that it uses a of pushrod and finally, it comes with all-season tires and you're thinking none of this is it. Well, but if you look closely at any of these things, you'll find that there's actually a brilliant reason why, so for number one, we'll start with one of my favorite facts about this new Corvette, so when I was chatting with Chevy engineers about this, one of the fascinating things about their brake-by-wire system is that it can stop the car even if the brake fluid boils, which Chevy calls this eBoost now, before you panic about the failure. electronics and not having brakes don't worry Chevy thought of this too if the electronics failed the master cylinder still generates pressure with your foot and you can stop the car but it usually just uses the movement of your feet to determine how much pressure it should have the electric pump. generate for the brake pads, this means you can create different brake modes by altering how the brake pedal feels if you want and Chevy does this depending on what driving mode you are in.

What's most fascinating to me is what happens when things start to work. It gets hot, so let's say you brake very hard and then accelerate up to 120 miles per hour and then brake very hard again and then accelerate again and then brake very hard again and again and again and again, we start to get very hot. that brake fluid and you know that maybe you haven't been up to date with your maintenance and you've gotten a little bit of water in that brake fluid, since that brake fluid gets very hot, it could start to boil that fluid well one Once that liquid becomes a gas, it is compressible, which is why boiling brake fluid is so dangerous.

If you have air in the brake lines, it is very difficult to stop because instead of applying pressure to the brake pads, you are simply slightly compressing some of the air inside the lines. and you're not getting much braking force, your foot can only press the brake pedal all the way once you've hit the brakes, if it doesn't stop you're not stopping scary things, but what if you have an electric pump creating ? that pressure when you step on the brake pedal and the fluid has boiled, the pump does not stop abruptly like your foot does with the floor, it simply sees that you want high braking pressure and since there is air in the line you are not getting pumps and pumps and it pumps compressing that air as much as possible so that it actually builds up enough air pressure inside the line to force that pad against the rotor and stop the car.

The incredible number two is the braking distance now, the previous generation in Corvette. The c7 had one of the shortest stopping distances of any production car, so Motor Trend tested a 2014 Corvette Convertible and it stopped from 60 miles per hour to zero in just 90 feet. Motor Trend tested the new Corvette, the 2020 c8, and stopped. from 60 miles per hour to zero in 97 feet and 7 feet further, so why did this happen? I asked Corvette engineers about this and there are a couple of reasons for this. First of all it should be noted that from a physics point of view there is nothing about the c8 that indicates that it should have a longer braking distance because it has the engine in the rear and it has a better weight distribution focused on the rear when braking, as the weight shifts forward, it has the weight more evenly distributed between all four tires compared to the previous generation Corvette, which is beneficial for braking, but this also poses the first challenge, unlike the previous generation Corvette which had a 50/50 weight distribution, this one has a 60/40 weight distribution, so when you hit those brakes, the weight distribution shifts from back to front and a load changes where most of the load is on the front tires, which means you're changing from a rear brake bias to a front brake bias and Chevy says handling that from an ABS standpoint is a challenge, but once that transition happens, the ABS is easy to deal with now, once you've started braking from that point on, it should have better distribution and better tires, so it should still have better stopping distance. braking, well, here's the thing if you want to design a car that stops as fast as Possibly that's very different than designing a car that goes around a track as fast as possible, so what Chevy claims they did is they limited the force maximum braking on the rear tires because if the rear tires are overloaded, they stop as quickly as possible. any steering input provided from the front of the car makes the rear end very nervous, the rear end wants to kick, obviously this is not ideal if you are trying to get around a track as quickly as possible, to improve compatibility with track. nature of the Corvette c8, the rear brakes are slightly limited, which means the stopping distance is also slightly limited number three, if you've seen any video of the new Corvette driving on a track, you've probably heard the reviewer say that the car understeers , it's a Go to the topic of conversation and I think it's okay to make that statement.

I drove one on a track and found the understeer to be minimal, but there was a touch. I think the danger here is simply saying that understeer is bad and then not diving in. Also, because you can design a car to do anything, increase rear roll bar size, oversteer, decrease front tire pressure, you can oversteer, remove front sway bar, understeer, change alignment, tire pressures , anti-roll bars, etc. This changes which end of the car is most likely to lose traction first, whether it's front-end understeer or rear-end oversteer, but when you're creating an incredibly capable car and offering it at a pretty reasonable price for what this what we're getting here is around 72,000 because it's okay.

It's a recipe for inexperienced drivers to get into trouble. You have to know your audience and understeer is safer and easier to predict if you're not exactly sure what. You're behind the wheel, but that doesn't mean the driving experience has to be boring. Chevy has some clever tricks to make this even faster around a track. One that is great is the ability to balance the car in the corners, that is, the combination. The weight of the rear left and front right tires matches the combined weight of the front left and rear right tires, which helps the hand.

Chevy has put in threaded spring seats so you can adjust the spring preload and alter the height for cornering balance by 20 millimeters. of travel up or down from the standard position for track use, they also recommend reducing cold tire pressure by approximately 30 psi around 223 psi at the front 24 psi at the rear obviously when driving on a track, you're going to put a lot more heat into the tires, which increases hot tire pressure significantly, so aim for a hot tire pressure of about 32 psi. They also recommend adjusting the camber if you are going to see some track use so the car is set to negative 0.5 degrees front and rear for camber and they recommend for track use setting the front at 3 degrees negative and the rear in negative two point five degrees.

All of this is to say, it understeers, yes, a little, but the suspension has built-in adjustability if you want it. change that number four, now we're talking about engines. I used to say that valve-per-cylinder pushrod engines had no place in a modern car because it used to be dumb, some things never change, but pushrod engines aren't dumb. They're brilliant, they're simple, they have fewer moving parts than many alternatives, they make great torque at low revs, they're compact, they have admirable engine weight and you know, if you keep things simple, you can keep costs down too. It's interesting to watch it now. who have stuck the engine in the rear, they don't have to worry about the intake manifold interrupting the driver's line of sight, so the intake manifold is now larger and, for the first time in a Corvette, uses runners Equal length as the exhaust manifold as well.

Now going up instead of down, all of this helps increase power to 495 horsepower and 475 ft. of torque with the 6.2-liter V8's high-performance exhaust, and for the first time, the base Stingray gets a system. of dry sump oil with three recovery punks that improve. oil circulation for better performance on the track, also a quick shout out to Mobil 1, they have been a great partner for the channel; In fact, when I left my engineering job in 2014, it was as a result of Mobil 1 inviting me to drive the new C7 Corvette on a track after I ran out of vacation time, a two-week notice fixed that and I passed My first time driving on a track in the Corvette c7.

I even got a little trophy for posting one of the fastest section times Fun fact: All c7 and c8 Corvettes are filled at the factory with Mobil 1 motor oil and have been recommended Vil service for all Corvettes since 1993. In the case of the c8, use Mobil 1 ESP formula zero W 40, finally we get two. Tires are one of my favorite topics and this car has all season tires. What a mid-engined car with its site set up for supercar territory and coming standard with all seasons. I was as disappointed as you when I sat inside one for the first time and then drove it.

I don't know what magic Michelin has done with these, but you forget that they have the words written all season long on your first launch or your first hard corner. These are very grippy tires, they almost have 1 G of cornering grip. I measured a zero to 60 time of 3.4 seconds up to 40 miles per hour, it averages 0.9 G of acceleration and remember this is an all season rear wheel drive car, the stop from 60 to zero occurred in 112 feet, that is, 1.07. G average deceleration on a bad road as a quick comparison. I took my Mazda mx-5 on that same road and did the same braking test and it is sitting on Bridgestone re 71, our tires which are a very aggressive summer tire have a short tread life and These tires stop my car in one hundred and eleven feet, just one foot less than these all-season tires on the Corvette, so their summer performance is excellent and yet they are still all-season tires.

What I was also surprised to hear is that "Apparently they are pretty decent in the snow now, when I look at them I certainly have a hard time saying you should use them in the snow, that's not what I'm saying. I certainly think you should get the right tire for any situation". We're in, but what I'm saying is that Corvette engineers drove them through the Michigan winters and were really impressed with the grip they have in the cold and in the snow, and there's one more trick the engineers claimed about these tires, Apparently they are a little less sensitive. to the vertical load versus the summer tires that are offered with the z51 package, so what this means is saying, for example, you're in the car and you're going through a crested corner, that will change and take some of the load off on these tires and apparently in these situations this tire behaves a little more predictably at the beginning.

I thought this might be a result of using softer sidewalls, but the all season ones have a very similar sidewall to the ps4 s tires offered with the z51, the difference is all. The seasonal compound is softer and since the tread blocks have cuts, they are also softer and this in a sense means that the rubber behaves in a similar way to using a softer spring, which in scenarios like going over a ridge means it feels more predictable even if the PS4 has more grip overall, so I hope that one of the main takeaways I'm trying to convey with this video becomes increasingly clear and that is that you know you don't have You make this quick decision immediately when you hear some understeer that has been occurring all season.

If you get tired of some wire breaking, that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad right away and often there are very good reasons why things are done so if you dig a little deeper you can start to discover these things and that's what i think it isreally cool. about many of the aspects of this Corvette c8 and I also have to say a huge thank you to Chevrolet because I asked them. I saw this Corvette cutaway and I emailed them and said, can we put that thing in my garage? We said yes, so I think it's amazing.

I'm happy to have him here. Thank you all so much for watching. If you have any questions or comments, of course, feel free to leave them below.