The ZR-1 was too expensive to succeed — but too good to ignore | Jason Cammisa Revelations | Ep. 16

a zr1 when taking a sharp turn could scare other drivers and any driver who is about to use the full force of the zr1's brakes should be aware that other cars may not be able to stop as quickly i didn't i didn't write This is literally a quote from the book, the driver's manual that came with the original ZR1, the sound of the LT5 engine when accelerating hard at full engine power could disturb other drivers and passersby, so like any other old man at a car show i would like to tell you all about my car before the new z06 flat crank the zr1 was the only corvette that ever had more than one camshaft and it had four it also had 32 valves 16 fuel injectors and 11 accelerators plus three dads, it was the one that accelerated the fastest.

The car you could buy was also the fastest with the exception of a 12-cylinder Ferrari. It generated the greatest grip on the skidpad ever recorded. He posted the second best slalom numbers the world had ever seen. It was called the most capable car on the planet. It decimated a Porsche 911 turbo on a race track and cost half the money and yet it was a complete and utter market failure but we'll get to that in a minute the zr1 was a 4th generation corvette and although today It may seem like this, the existence of a corvette as a fact there was almost no c4 at all, while the corvette was a huge marketing win for chevrolet historically it made no money to fix this chevy increased the price of the c3 generation corvette above doubling its price in 10 years even taking inflation into account, in fact, in 1980 alone, Chevy raised the price of the corvette four times and yet people bought it anyway, so maybe, to Reluctantly, GM Brass gave the go-ahead to create the first completely new corvette in 20 years and the first corvette that was not produced under the watchful eye of its creator Zora Arcus Duntov and because the market had become accustomed to the higher prices. high, the c4 could go high-tech, it had a five-link rear suspension that earned praise for its handling. the sharpest angle of any windshield and headlights falling forward 162 and a half degrees, plus its radiator was tilted back 15 degrees, this was

good

for cooling but helped the corvette team achieve another of its objectives which was to minimize the front cross section for radar view a typical car could be seen by a radar gun at 3000 feet but not the c4 its body is made of plastic and the first thing the radar would find was the radiator, tilting the radiator back meant that a police officer couldn't see. your ass speeding in one of these up to only 1500 feet away and that kind of design goal is why American car companies rule and if you think I'm kidding I didn't learn it from this book that was written by the guy who made this car and this is amazing, I really liked the rest of the C4, the only big disappointments were an interior that was made of pure disappointment and a shaky frame made of soggy corn dog dough, oh and a discomfort or a small block that caused the same horsepower that was fully accelerated.

However, the big problem was that the Corvette suddenly had a ton of Japanese competition and a major bomb was about to drop in the form of the Acura NSX. Chevy had no choice but to give the C4 serious. firepower, they started out evaluating turbocharged V6s and then realized that a V6 and a Corvette are sacrilege, thank

good

ness, so they moved on to small blocks with two turbochargers and that's incredible, they were making over 400 horsepower and 500 pound-feet of torque, so they put then-GM President Lloyd Royce in one and he got a little too enthusiastic on the throttle and ran it off the road.

If this sounds familiar, it's because his son, Mark Royce, who is now the president of GM, revved too hard in a C7 Zr1 and spun. Crashing it into a wall during the 2018 Detroit Grand Prix doesn't matter because the twin-turbo V8s would never have met the Corvette's fuel economy standards and this is all irrelevant because GM didn't have a single transmission that could handle all that. Turbo Torque Turbos make torque and if you want to make crazy power without crazy torque, you need crazy revs. The small block wasn't going to do that, as it turns out that Lotus, which at the time was owned by GM, was working on a new 4 cam 32. valve v8 for its Aetna show car, so GM asked to fit those four valve heads on the old small block, which Lotus unfortunately did at the factory.

The C4s engine was mounted from below and the wide lotus head small block was too wide to pass through. frame rails somehow, the Corvette team convinced GM management to allow Lotus to build an all-new v8 from scratch. It shared no parts with the small block and produced 400 horsepower, or 50 percent more power than the small block with the same displacement. and 30 more pound-feet of torque for good measure, unfortunately it had a 4.55-inch center diameter and if you're a GM guy, this is another sacrilege. Small block Chevy V8s should have 4.40 inch bore spacing, it's just a tradition, let's be honest.

It has absolutely no effect on the experience of an engine, but it meant Lotus had to redesign everything. A smaller gap meant a smaller bore, which meant smaller valves, and ultimately the thing could only make 375 horsepower, but it did so without incurring a gas mileage penalty. This is how the LT5 was born, Lotus did not have the capacity to build the engine nor did GM, so Chevy hired Mercruiser, a division of Mercury Marine that manufactured internal engines in stern thrusters and they chose Mercury Marine because of their experience with systems. complicated. Aluminum castings lotus performed the engineering and durability tests at the same time mercury marine was establishing a special factory to build the lt5 at the same time the corvette crew was designing the rest of the zr1 working in parallel allowed the lt5 to move from the discussion to production in just three years which is half the time it would normally have taken 5.7 liters makes it bigger than any overhead cam v8 in production today it's huge it was beautiful too but those 16 individual intake runners say this has vtec, no, no, really.

More or less let me back up and explain that those fuel injectors needed to be able to deliver 400 horsepower of gasoline, but they also had to have enough control to deliver a small amount of fuel at idle and they couldn't do both. The Lotus solution. was to use two smaller injectors per cylinder at low rpm and low loads, only half of the injectors were used, half of the intake passages would be closed and the other half connected to intake valves that were mounted on soft lobes of the Tuned camshafts for efficiency and torque at low rpm.

At some point, at 3500 rpm at half throttle, the computer would open those other eight intake ports and start firing those other eight fuel injectors, but here's the interesting part: They were fed by intake valves running on a cam. higher lift so it could generate more power. at high revs this was the best of both worlds, true, it could be drivable and fuel efficient at low revs, but then it made a ton of power at high revs like vtec, except with vtec all intake valves run on profile high lift cam lobes, so this is really half the best of both worlds, but unlike the honda you had to manually turn it on in normal mode, the lt5 ran the low profile cam lobes with eight of The skates were closed and only half of the injectors worked, even with my knees like that.

The lt5 still makes as much power as the regular Corvette and pulls like a pushrod. V82 runs completely out of breath at 3000 rpm. It's really cool to experience it. However, the zr1 has a second key. You can put it on the center console, turn it and then. The engine can breathe through all 16 intake runners, however the key can only be removed in normal power mode, so if you lose this key you'll be left with a 210 horsepower ZR1. However, every time the max engine power light came on which was as annoying as a check engine light you got 375 horsepower and that was enough for the zr1 to win the car title most powerful American production.

It was also enough to break seven class records and three world endurance records, including a 24-hour endurance record that had stood for 50 years set in 1940 in the Mormon Meteor 3 Duesenberg modified with a Curtis Aviation v12 1570 cubic inch, that's 25.7 liters of displacement, that's just 5.7 and yet the zr1 took that old 161 mile per hour record and shattered it with an average of 175.885 miles per hour over 24 hours and by the way, it's not like that record is sitting out there Ford tried to beat it in a mustang failed Audi tried to beat it failed Mercedes also failed with their c-111 which was a prototype designed to break records the zr1 was just a production corvette that you could buy from bob At the dealership and as you can imagine the magazines lost their minds over the ZR1, acceleration of course was insane 0-60 in mid 4's and all that except the ample power delivery of the engine. was the highlight: the lt5 was so strong throughout its rev range that it energized the car and the drivers, now legendary 5-60 mph street test launches.

See what happened. In instrumented testing, the 911 turbo was half a second faster to 60, but in the real world, the zr1 was 10 out of 10 times faster. So they devised a test where they pulled out the ridiculously abusive launch and guessed what the zr1 was four tenths faster to 60. Oh, and it had a top speed of five miles per hour. highest stopped at 70 miles per hour 12 feet before it was two miles per hour faster in the slalom two and a half seconds faster on a race track thanks in part to adaptive Bilstein dampers borrowed from the Porsche 959 and then kicking the 911 turbo while lowering the corvette earned the turbo 4 miles per gallon on the highway and 3 miles per gallon in the city.

Oh and it costs 37k less at least at its original sticker price which was 60k which was double the price of a basic corvette and the world lost its mind because the zr1 special performance package was the most

expensive

option in detroit history and this car sold for 90,000 this guy got screwed because in about a year the zr1s were underselling the sticker and there are a bunch of really interesting Reasons why first there was a recession in 1991 and then recessions suck. Secondly, the interior of the C4 was barely acceptable for a 30,000 car and therefore completely unacceptable for a 60,000 car, to the point that while the ZR1 was busy defeating a Ferrari and a Lotus.

In a comparison test, the car and the driver said and I quote this car is an embarrassment to America until you step on the accelerator, to which I say, step on the accelerator, third reason why the LT5's reputation was marked by a couple of engines exploding, so this is ironic Lotus was surprised by how ridiculously tough GM's durability tests were. The LT5 had to pass a test in which it ranged between maximum torque and maximum power, from 4,800 to 5,800 rpm with regular trips to the redline for 200 hours straight at full speed. Lotus response. to the engines exploding is like sorry this can't be one of those engines it blew up before the car left the factory so GM stopped production and sent the engineers to Bowling Green and while they were there they heard a zr1 in the parking lot it starts up and goes straight to the red line so of course they ran over probably thinking something was wrong only to find out that this employee started every zr1 with her foot on the floor and that exposed a quality control issue in one of GM's camshaft manufacturers.

We'll never know if any of those engines would have blown up without that incredibly abusive starting procedure, but every zr1 has an extra rev limiter for when the engine was cold in case millions of dollars in R&D and some idiot blows up all the lt5s. . A fourth reason for the disappointing sales of the zr1 was the decision not to offend buyers of basic corvettes by making an improved model that looked improved, so that the zr1 was a 60,000 corvette that looked almost identical to a thirty thousand corvette. Dollars. It had rectangular taillights but a year later, all other corvettes got the same styling at the rear.

The rear of the zr1 was actually three incheswider than the normal corvette and that was to accommodate those ridiculous 315 millimeter wide steamrollers; However, to the design department's credit, I think the extra width was so well integrated that you couldn't tell by looking at the car, it just looked amazing, but that was a problem. The only way to tell this low-horsepower Corvette monster apart was to look for the roof-mounted brake light and that was it. It's amazing, speaking of the base corvette, that's where the fifth and biggest sales problem was that the internal small block team was very angry that GM went with Lotus for this v8 and, before long, the upset was l98, which It was a 37 year old small block. was scrapped in favor of the gen 2 small block in 1992, the lt1 dropped with 300 pushrod horsepower and that meant the base corvette was lighter and almost as fast as the zr1 and cost half as much as the routine row .

Lotus eventually gave it this 405 horsepower and was working on a 475 horsepower version, but that wasn't enough. Hell hath no fury as a small block engineer and the very existence of the zr1 and its lotus engine put those guys on the warpath, that warpath resulted in a whole new one from the ground up. all aluminum v8 and used a lot of lessons learned from the lotus v8 to beat the lotus v8. This is the engine we know today as the incomparable LS. The LS was two inches shorter, two inches lower, and weighed 240 pounds less than the LT5.

Furthermore, it cost GM something like 25,000 less to produce one unit and the ls was designed from the beginning for the introduction of obd2 in 1996, whose adaptation to the lt5 would have cost 1 million dollars and, furthermore, in its first appearance, The LS1 was made in 30 horsepower from the original LT5 anyway, so when the C4 went out of production the LT5 died along with it, but the ZR1 remains an absolute legend, the only overhead cam multi-valve engine in head never seen on the front of a corvette, this is the definitive c4, this was a preview. of corvettes to come world class artists who took No nonsense from anyone oh and in case you're wondering the reason we built the zr1 is simple because we can so I really love this okay so you'll keep the Ferrari framed all the time, right, yeah, okay, action. not a rich youtuber asking you to like and subscribe hey up up up up up up up up up up up keep the ferrari out I'm an automotive journalist asking you to like and subscribe and that's it because that's how youtube works if you don't click on those buttons youtube doesn't know that you liked what you just saw and it won't show you anything else and if you don't like what you just saw join the club and with that I want Say the Hagerty Drivers Club which gives you access to this award-winning magazine as well as discounts on awesome stuff and if you still don't like what you've seen, leave a nasty comment because that's how the internet works. go clean that