Chevrolet’s brand-new Corvette C8.R has a subpar racing debut at this past weekend’s Rolex 24 at Daytona, but its presence there—and our access to the pits—had one silver lining: Up close and personal with the race car, we were able to peek into its engine bay and try and pry whatever information we could about the car’s V-8 engine from any Chevy-related person nearby. Our interest goes beyond the obvious—that the C8.R is the first racing version of the first-ever factory mid-engine Corvette—and to the curiosity the C8.R’s exotic exhaust note aroused within us. This is no ordinary small-block Chevy, people.
Instead, the Corvette C8.R is powered by a very new, dual-overhead-cam 5.5-liter V-8. Regular 2020 Corvettes, the ones you can buy at dealerships, are sold with 6.2-liter pushrod V-8s. Chevrolet wasn’t keen on sharing much more beyond that with us, but the automaker couldn’t hide the C8.R engine’s other secret from anyone present at Daytona for the 24-hour endurance race: That it has a flat-plane crankshaft. The engine’s use of the flat-plane crank in place of typical Corvettes’ more common cross-plane crankshaft, is given away by its high-pitched, high-revving yowl. With surely a different firing order for its eight cylinders than the C8’s 6.2-liter V-8, and the higher engine speeds a flat-plane crank allows, the Corvette race car’s engine is distinctly Italian-sounding. That shouldn’t be a surprise, given how this crankshaft arrangement has long been favored by the likes of Ferrari. It’s also employed in the Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 and GT350R.
We weren’t able to determine much from, well, just looking at the C8.R’s engine bay. The new V-8 was briefly visible during routine fiddling in the pits before the race, when the team had removed the hatch door covering the engine compartment. However, it is buried deep in a rat’s nest of structural tubing and thermal-wrapped arteries and topped by a carbon-fiber intake plenum fed by a snorkel that pokes through the rear hatch covering. Forget the production Corvette V-8’s fancy red crinkle-finish valve covers, carbon-fiber dress-up bits, and generally hot presentation in the C8’s engine bay—the race car is pure business, and as such, not much in terms of eye candy.
The 5.5-liter DOHC V-8 won’t live in obscurity, deep inside the C8.R forever, though. It is widely expected that the production C8 Corvette will adopt a similar V-8 in the future—possibly even with forced induction added to it for even more power. (Rules in the C8.R’s racing class dictate a horsepower ceiling of around 500 horsepower, which is just a hair above what the 6.2-liter Corvette Stingray makes now.) Per our sources, figure on the dual-overhead-cam V-8 making far more than that and finding its way into the upcoming Corvette Z06 or some other tarted-up, higher-performance C8 model. More details are forthcoming, but know this: If our experience at Daytona is any indication, you’ll want to brace yourself for a very different-sounding, different-behaving Corvette engine in the not-so-distant future.
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Source: WORLD NEWS
