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This move is way overdue, even though it may alienate some Old Skool Vette enthusiasts who still imagine the “big block up front” to be a smart arrangement. Even so, it’s half a liter more than I traditionally think of when speaking of a “smallblock Chevy” mill.
@Borommakot, what do you think?
I’m in a Vette page or two on FB and have seen the expected fair amount of controversy with not only the mid engine lay out, but also the new style.
I was literally just saving some photos to add on here and talk about it.
I’ll throw em up anyway.
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Zora Arkus Duntov, “the father/savior of the Corvette” wanted a mid engine car ever since the Miura. There’s been numerous engineering vehicles that was “Corvette-esque” that were mid engine… but GM bean counters never let it fully come to fruition. The numerous performance package all bear Zora’s initial.
ZR1, Z06, Z51 etc. It came time to where the front-mid engine layout (engine behind the front axle but in front of driver) came to being too hard to make it faster. The only way was to move the engine.
I’m excited to see what happens next. DOHC would never make it into the Corvette due to packaging. And same with turbos. Now there’s room. The engine bay is no longer constrained- and “new” tech has helped. That black blob to the front right of the engine is the oil sump for the dry sump system. There is no huge oil pan to make the engine taller.
I love it.
My only concern is that there’ll always be a finite number of meat heads who’ll get one of these beasts only to find out the hard way that their hands and reflexes just ain’t quick enough to keep it on the road. Mid-engine cars are squirrelly AF under power.
Yes and no.
You can bring up the Fiero and MR2 as complete examples for the “squirrelyness”, but aftermarket suspension on both has fixed a pot of the problems- which was bumpsteer, bad spring rate and rebound and so forth. Coilovers, swaybars and bushings with adjustable control arms pretty much fixed the snap oversteer /understeer problems of those two cars. Alot can also be blamed on old tire tech.
Corvettes have been around 50/50 weight ratio for awhile and being a FMR layout they’ve been known for their oversteer already. I have a feeling that it won’t be too different aside from weight transfers during turns and hard acceleration, which, theoretically, if GM got their head out of their ass and developed a good mid engine suspension layout… I doubt they’ll have a problem. The suspension looks good, in both visual and performance output.
Okay, but I’m talking about meat heads and you’re talking about drivers.
I wasn’t directly around those, but a buddy of mine was at a Pontiac store when those were out, he had a GT as a Demo and if I recall weren’t they supposed to have fixed most of those issues on the gt? (Or maybe that was just the party line being fed to the franchisees.)
I’m not too keen on the Fieros, all I know is they sucked… lol
I know late MR2s got revised control arms to “fix” their snap steering issues, which probably would have been similar for the Fiero if they “fixed” it
This meme is relevant
