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

[Music] [Applause] [Music] a zr1 rounding a sharp bend might startle other motorists and any driver about to use the full force of zr1 brakes must be aware that other cars might not be able to stop as quickly i didn't i didn't write this this is literally a quote from the book the driver's manual that came with the original zr1 the sound of the lt5 engine under hard acceleration in full engine power could disturb other motorists and passers-by [Applause] [Music] and so like any other old guy at a car show i'd like to tell you all about my car [Music] [Applause] [Music] prior to the new flat plane crank z06 the zr1 was the only corvette to ever have more than one camshaft and it had four it also had 32 valves 16 fuel injectors and 11 throttles plus three daddies it was the quickest accelerating car you could buy it was the fastest too with the exception of one 12-cylinder ferrari it generated the highest skid pad grip ever recorded posted the second best slalom numbers the world had ever seen it was called the most capable handling car on the planet it decimated a porsche 911 turbo around a racetrack and it cost half the money and yet it was a complete and utter marketplace failure but we'll get to that in a minute the zr1 was a 4th gen corvette and though it may seem today like the existence of a corvette as a given there almost wasn't a c4 at all while the corvette was a huge marketing win for chevrolet historically it didn't make money to fix this chevy ramped up the price of the previous generation c3 corvette doubling its price in 10 years even accounting for inflation in fact in 1980 alone chevy raised the price of the corvette four times and yet people bought it anyway and so perhaps begrudgingly gm brass gave the go-ahead to create the first all-new corvette in 20 years and the first ever corvette not produced under the watchful eye of its creator zora arcus duntov and because the market had gotten used to the higher pricing the c4 could go high-tech it had a five-link rear suspension that garnered praise for its handling also it had the most acute angle of any windshield and headlights that tumble forward 162 and a half degrees also its radiator was angled back 15 degrees this was good for cooling but it helped the corvette team reach another one of their targets which was minimizing frontal cross-section for radar see a typical car could be seen by a radar gun at 3 000 feet but not the c4 its body is made out of plastic and the first thing the radar would encounter was the radiator angling the radiator backwards meant that a cop couldn't see your feloniously speeding ass in one of these until just 1500 feet away and that kind of design target is why american car companies rule and if you think i'm joking i'm not i learned it from this book that was written by the guy who made this car and this is awesome the rest of the c4 was well liked the only big letdowns were an interior that was made out of pure disappointment and a quivering structure made from soggy corn dog batter oh and a malaise or a small block that made the same horsepower turned off as it did that full throttle the big problem though was that the corvette suddenly had a bunch 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 by evaluating turbocharged v6s and then realized that a v6 and a corvette is sacrileged thank god so then they went to twin turbocharged small blocks and that's awesome they were making more than 400 horsepower and 500 pound-feet of torque and so they put gm's then president lloyd royce in one and he got a little overzealous with the throttle and spun it right off the road um if this sounds familiar it's because mark royce his son who himself is now gm's president applied too much throttle in a c7 zr1 and spun it into a wall during the 2018 detroit grand prix doesn't matter because the twin turbo v8s would have never met the corvette's fuel economy standards and all of this is irrelevant because gm didn't have a single transmission that could deal with all of that turbo torque turbos make torque and if you want to make crazy horsepower without crazy torque you need crazy revs small block wasn't going to do that as it turns out lotus which at the time was owned by gm was working on a new 4 cam 32 valve v8 for its aetna show car and so gm asked to put those four valve heads on the old small block which lotus did unfortunately at the factory the c4s engine got mounted from the bottom and the wide lotus headed small block was too wide to fit through the frame rails somehow the corvette team talked gm management into allowing lotus to build an all-new from the ground up v8 it shared no parts with the small block and made 400 horsepower that's 50 percent more power than the small block did from the same displacement and 30 pound feet of torque more for good measure unfortunately it had a 4.55 inch bore center and if you're a gm guy this is another sacrilege small block chevy v8s must have a bore spacing of 4.40 inches it's just tradition let's be honest bore spacing has absolutely no effect on the experience of an engine but it meant that lotus had to redesign the entire thing smaller spacing meant smaller bore which meant smaller valves and ultimately the thing could only produce 375 horsepower but it did so without incurring a gas guzzler penalty and thus the lt5 was born lotus didn't have the capacity to actually build the engine nor did gm for that matter so chevy contracted mercruiser a division of mercury marine which made inboard engines in stern drives and they chose mercury marine because of its experience with complicated aluminum castings lotus did the engineering and durability testing at the same time as mercury marine was setting up a special factory to build the lt5 at the same time that the corvette crew was engineering the rest of the zr1 working in parallel allowed the lt5 to go from discussion to production in only three years which is half the time it would have normally taken 5.7 liters makes this bigger than any overheadcam v8 in production today it's huge it was also beautiful but those 16 individual intake runners are telling this has vtec no no not really sort of let me back up and explain to you those fuel injectors needed to be able to deliver 400 horsepower worth of gasoline but also had to have enough control to deliver a teensy little amount of fuel for idle and they couldn't do both lotus's solution was to go to two smaller injectors per cylinder at low revs and low loads only half the injectors were used half the intake runners would be closed off and the other half connected to intake valves that rode on mild camshaft lobes tuned for low rpm efficiency and torque at some point 3 500 rpm half throttle the computer would open those other eight intake ports and start to fire those other eight fuel injectors but here's the cool part they were fed by intake valves that ran on a higher lift cam so it could make more power at high revs this was the best of both worlds right it could be tractable and fuel efficient at low revs but then make a ton of power up high like vtec except with vtec all of the intake valves are running on the high lift cam profile so this is really half of the best of both worlds but unlike the honda you had to manually switch it on in normal mode the lt5 ran on the low profile cam lobes with eight of the runners closed off and only half the injectors working even kneecapped like this the lt5 still made as much power as the regular corvette and it pulls like a pushrod v82 it runs completely out of breath at 3000 rpm it's really cool to experience however the zr1 has a second key you can put this in 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're stuck with a 210 horsepower zr1 however any time the full engine power light was illuminated which was as annoying as a check engine light you got 375 horsepower and that was enough to earn the zr1 the title of the most powerful american production car it was also enough to shatter seven class records and three endurance world records including a 24-hour endurance record that had stood for 50 years set in 1940 in the mormon meteor 3 modified duesenberg with a 1570 cubic inch curtis aviation v12 um that's 25.7 liters of displacement that's only 5.7 and yet the zr1 took that old 161 mile an hour record and shattered it averaging 175.885 miles an hour for 24 hours and by the way it's not like that record was just sitting around ford tried to break it in a mustang failed audi tried to break it failed mercedes also failed with its c-111 which was a prototype designed to break records the zr1 was just a production corvette you could buy down at the dealership from bob and so as you can imagine the magazines lost their collective minds over the zr1 the acceleration of course was insane 0-60 in the mid-4s and all that but the engine's broad power delivery was the real highlight the lt5 was so strong throughout its entire rev range that it spurred car and drivers now legendary 5 to 60 mile an hour street start test see what happened was in instrumented testing the 911 turbo was a half a second quicker to 60 but in the real world the zr1 was quicker 10 times out of 10. so they devised a test where they pulled out the ridiculously abusive launch and guess what the zr1 was four tenths quicker to 60. oh and it had a top speed five miles an hour higher stopped from 70 miles an hour 12 feet sooner was two miles an hour faster through the slalom two and a half seconds quicker around a racetrack thanks in part to adaptive bilstein dampers taken from the porsche 959 and then to kick the 911 turbo while it was down the corvette beat the turbo by 4 miles per gallon on the highway and 3 miles per gallon in the city oh and it costs 37 000 less at least at its original sticker price which was 60 000 that was twice the price of a base corvette and the world lost its mind because the zr1 special performance package was the single most expensive option in the history of detroit and this car sold for 90 000 this guy got shafted because within a year or so the zr1s were selling below sticker and there's a bunch of really interesting reasons why first there was a recession in 1991 then recessions suck second the c4s interior was barely acceptable for a 30 000 car and thus completely unacceptable for a 60 000 car so much so that while the zr1 was busy beating a ferrari and a lotus in a comparison test car and driver said and i quote this car is a rolling embarrassment to america until you stand on the gas to which i say stand on the gas third reason the lt5's reputation was scarred by a couple of engines blowing up so this is ironic lotus was shocked at how ridiculously harsh gm's durability testing was the lt5 had to pass a test where it cycled between peak torque and peak horsepower so 4 800 to 5800 rpm with regular trips into the red line for 200 straight hours at full throttle lotus's response to the engines blowing up is like sorry this can't be one of those engines blew up before the car even left the factory so gm halted production and sent the engineers over to bowling green and while they're there they hear a zr1 out in the parking lot crank and go straight to red line so of course they run over probably thinking something's wrong only to find out that this employee started every single zr1 with her foot on the floor and that exposed a quality control problem in one of gm's camshaft manufacturers whether any of those engines would have blown up without that unbelievably abusive starting procedure we'll never know but every zr1 got an extra rev limiter for when the engine was cold just in case millions of dollars in r d and one idiot blows all the lt5s up a fourth reason for the zr1's disappointing sales was the decision not to offend base corvette buyers by making an upgraded model that looked upgraded so the zr1 was a 60 000 corvette that looked almost identical to a thirty thousand dollar corvette it had rectangular tail lights but a year later every other corvette got the same rear end styling dumb the zr1's rear end was actually three inches wider than the regular corvette and that was to fit those ridiculous 315 millimeter wide steamrollers however to the credit of the design department i think the extra width was so well integrated that you couldn't tell by looking at the car it just looked awesome but that was a problem the only way to tell this monster apart from the horsepower choked bass corvette was to look for the roof mounted brake light and that wasn't awesome speaking of the base corvette that's where the fifth and biggest sales problem was the internal small block team was mighty pissed off that gm went to lotus for this v8 and so in short order the malaise era l98 which was a 37 year old small block was thrown out 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 quick as the zr1 and cost half as much rut row lotus eventually gave this 405 horsepower and was working on a 475 horsepower version but that wasn't enough hell hath no fury like a small block engineer and the very existence of the zr1 and its lotus motor set those guys on a warpath that war path resulted in another all-new from the ground up all aluminum v8 and it used a whole bunch 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 plus it cost gm something like 25 000 a unit less to produce and the ls was designed from the outset for the 1996 introduction of obd2 which would have cost 1 million dollars to retrofit to the lt5 and besides in its first appearance the ls1 made within 30 horsepower of the original lt5 anyway so when the c4 went out of production the lt5 died alongside it but the zr1 remains an absolute legend the only overhead cam multi-valve engine ever in the front of a corvette this is the ultimate c4 this was a preview of corvettes to come world-class performers that took no crap from anyone oh and in case you were wondering the reason we build the zr1 is simple because we can [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] i really love this [Music] okay so you're just gonna keep the ferrari framed out the entire time right yep okay action i'm not some 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 because that's how youtube works if you don't click those buttons youtube doesn't know you liked what you've just seen and isn't going to show you any more of it and if you don't like what you've just seen well join the club and by that i mean the hagerty drivers club which gets you access to this award-winning magazine as well as discounts on amazing stuff and if if you still don't like what you've seen well then just leave a nasty comment because that's how the internet works i need to go clean that up

Channel: Hagerty

Views: 2,204,135

Keywords: Hagerty, Classic Car, Classic Cars, Hagerty Drivers Club, collector car, enthusiast car, collector cars, throttle house, motor trend, jay leno, Doug demuro, camissa, camisa, ZR1, Zora Arkus Duntov, GM, Bowling Green, Engine failure, Sound, Acceleration, wheelspin, burnout, POV, Back road, drive, history, radar, speeding ticket

Id: 6Vs2tdR-9C8

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Uptons_BJs]

The ZR1 was only a sales failure by the higher standards of the 90s. Back when coupes still sold decent numbers.

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They sold like ~1100/year for 6 years. That's really, really good for a top trim halo model by today's standards. Mercedes Benz sold 1,791 SL classes in total in 2019

[u/snaaaaaaaaaaaaake]

Growing up, I had a buddy whose dad had one of these and a modified Grand National in his garage. I was too dumb at the time to know how cool these cars were. I do remember my buddy telling me about his mom brake boosting the GN at a stop light so she could dust some car revving it's engine next to her.

[u/flavorburst]

Jason's videos are some of the best car content on YouTube. He's engaging, the production value is really high, and I always learn something from them. If you haven't watched others I'd highly recommend the Honda S500 video.

The extra little bits of information make the videos so much fun, the bit about the radar detection and the story about redline startups at the factory were hilarious.

[u/Candid94]

IDK wtf hagerty is or does, but goddammit they have the best automotive video production team in the business right now.

[u/madevilfish]

I love how one of the metrics for this car was to evade cop's radar guns. It’s wild to me that because the car was made of plastic and fiberglass the radar had to hit the radiator for the gun to get a good reading. Then by angling the radiator back, it was spotted at 150 meters instead of another car which would be spotted at 300 meters!

[u/Haematobic]

"Hell hath no fury like a small block engineer", lol!

I had no idea that the LT5 was the reason behind the development of the now iconic LS. Either way, I think the LT5 is a fantastic engine, and the ZR-1 my all-time favorite 'Vette. It screams "late 80s design" much better than the Countach.

EDIT: Daily reminder that the C4 was the platform chosen by Callaway for their legendary "Sledgehammer".

[u/YouAreMentalM8]

Awesome video. Even better if you've watched the recent Carmudgeon episode where Jason discusses some more of the history and research for the video.

It's a bit of a way into this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLU1KR85TCs

[u/NitchBiggas]

Every single one of these episodes is incredible.

[u/c0rbin9]

These are neat and survived in great numbers. It is still easy to find a C4 ZR-1 in pristine condition since so many were prized by their owners and never modified.