Secrets of the 2001 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 - Car Nerds

this is a 2001 c5 Corvette zo6 with a 5.7 liter ls6 v8 and a six-speed manual transmission now we're talking here this is a Corvette with cojones that's Corvette chief engineer tabs you behind the wheel tabs join GM in 1977 and began working on Corvettes in the 1990s as the total vehicle systems engineer he knows everything that happened behind the scenes of the c5 s development Paget's been busy with the launch of the seventh generation Corvette Stingray not to mention the zo6 version but not so busy that he couldn't drive car and driver down memory lane and ancestral Corvettes from c1 through c six I've known him for 20 years and he's always been the kind of guy who's up for a quick spin around the block for no reason other than to talk Corvettes with a fellow Carter all right we're up to see five Corvettes were very serious by this time the power came back the handling was in force 385 horsepower big brakes 17 and 18 inch wheels and still not too expensive still well under $50,000 in this trim yeah this is the zero six this is the car that was originally intended to be the budget price Corvette it's the fixed roof coupe and at that time sales of the c4 the car we were just in were relatively low and so marketing solution to that was we got to have a model that drops the price pretty dramatically so we actually put together a Corvette model ahead cloth seats and mirrors that you had to ask your passenger to adjust basically zero creature comforts and it was intended to be the third model out coupe convertible in the budget rate fixed roof car as this is and when we brought to see five out the response was so positive we were making as many cars in Bowling Green as we could between the coupe and the convertible and why we'd bring out a price leader at that point just didn't make any sense didn't take us too long to decide what to do with the lightest stiffest variant that we had of the car we brought it out with z51 standards only way it came and then two years later we brought out the zero six which upgraded a lot of aspects of the car and revitalize the zero six brand and to what it means today a kind of a gold standard for performance was this is Jim Perkins era where marketing helped fund engineering budget to save Corvette and make it absolutely you know this car is a radically differently constructed kart hide reformed rails and to n the center backbone we really in engineering one to prove that the concepts would work in reality so we wanted to build a surf a Corvette experimental research vehicle very expensive to build a one-off car engineering had no approved budget no approved program at that time we couldn't start a program with some kind of proof of concept that's where the story comes from where Jim Perkins diverted some amount quite a lot of money from his advertising budget to help pay for that vehicle this is where we started again in the small-block engines that pulled hard right to redline a really good torque extension as opposed to being Torquay early and then rolling off as your approach to redline these cars pulled pretty hard beautiful instruments very simple classic unadorned really no no Chrome no nothing just big and clear black and white 200 mile an hour speedometer laid slightly over a 7000 rpm tach easy to read no gorgeous red needles our calibration marks I remember the day I came back from design where we were looking at interior graphics proposals and they had an 8,000 rpm tach and that meant a good portion of the tack was just read unusable and they they just like the idea of an 8,000 rpm tach I hated it because it made the resolution of the working part of the tach smaller and so I expressed that in design and they told me to go away they didn't like that at all so I immediately ran back to Dave Hill the boss said Dave look this is what they're planning on doing we really don't need more than a 7000 rpm tach we got no plans to do any engines of Rev over 6,500 let's expand the working part of the gauge and make it even clearer to read had a big fight over it and you can see who won I'm very happy you won that battle it seems like a small thing but if you win enough of those over the whole spectrum of decisions you make in the car can make a big difference in the end it's not a small thing it's very significant there's a tendency to dumb things down the assumption that the driver really doesn't use these as they're purely cosmetic devices on here not true instrumentation it's really insulting to customers I agree had journalists huge debate over whether to put the key on the - that was a monstrous debate we always had key in column putting a key on the dash was a technological stretch because of column walking Dave Hill and one of the rare very rare instances where he agreed to spend money to do something that wasn't an actual functional necessity he wanted to Telegraph that this car was different this time we're different we're not the same as what Corvettes have been in the past were not the same as many other even General Motors products at the time key in the dash was considered an exotic and upscale feature you

Channel: Car and Driver

Views: 212,915

Rating: 4.8805194 out of 5

Keywords: Chevrolet Corvette (Automobile Model), Chevy, Chevrolet (Brand), Chevrolet Corvette C5 Z06, ZO6, hardtop, C5 z06, LS6, Z-06, Don Sherman, Car And Driver (Magazine), Tadge Juechter, Car Nerds

Id: bbqKW3hDhmQ

Length: 6min 4sec (364 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 13 2014