Yahoo Autos The 2025 Corvette ZR1's Secrets Have Been Hiding in Plain Sight
The 1,064-horsepower 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 is, to put it plainly, one of the most ambitious cars General Motors has ever built. Numbers this massive are hard to hit on a whim, though, and GM didn't go into this impulsively; the mid-engined C8 Corvette was always designed with the Z06 and the more extreme ZR1 in mind. That means most of the foundational pieces of the ZR1 have been hiding in plain sight for some time, waiting to make sense in a different context.
The most obvious piece is the twin-turbocharged LT7 engine, which shares its bones with the remarkable naturally-aspirated LT6 V-8 seen in the C8-gen Corvette Z06.
—Assistant chief engineer Dustin Gardner
The immense amount of work that went into developing this engine for a middle-tier Corvette was its own hint that a more powerful version was coming, but the car had some physical hints, too.
Since the two engines were developed together as twin projects, they were referred to internally as "Gemini;" both engines are dotted with Gemini rocket logos, a reference to both the mythical twins and NASA's second cycle of manned missions to space.
Small-block engine assistant chief engineer Dustin Gardner says that the LT6 had "about 55 rockets" on it, often used internally as directional arrows to aid assembly. The LT7 apparently has even more, including "big ones on the turbos."
Gardner says the idea "just goes back to when we code named the program. We liked the the tie to NASA — the LT6 and [the LT7] were both kind of our moonshot. We were gonna do two of them."
Gardner says that there are some mechanical artifacts in the LT6 from its parallel development alongside the LT7, too. "I'm actually shocked people didn't notice. There's a lot of casting features around turbo lube, turbo cooling, as well as turbo oil scavenging - all that is in the LCC from the beginning."
Corvette executive chief engineer Tadge Juechter says that the engines were developed together and share parts as often as possible, but adds that "everything that needed to be bespoke for the turbo engine was bespoke for the turbo engine.”
Juechter also mentions the shape of the air intakes, which fit in with the existing wide body design on Z06 and Corvette E-Ray models that do not have the same cooling needs as the twin-turbo ZR1. "If you come around the side, there's two unique entry ports on this car. We've had this sweeping gesture on the side of the car for Z06, and it looked like it was kind of, you know, a design aesthetic. It's there because we knew we were going to be taking air in at this area, later, on this car."
The gearbox was also planned with ZR1 in mind. Juechter says it "had to be planned way back from the beginning. We knew we had this torque monster coming out, And we actually had to have bigger gear width spacing to manage that torque — there's a bunch of internal improvements for strength and improved lubrication for the quickness of this car on the track."
The exterior design was previewed in advance too, although not on the Z06 road car. The ZR1's signature split rear window was first shown on the C8 Z06.R, a GT3 race car that debuted this season. Cars with the ZR1-style window have already run at Daytona, Sebring, Le Mans, and a variety of other tracks around the world. The shared element is a bit more subtle this time, but the choice mirrors the decision to debut the LT6.R racing engine in the C8.R race car years before the naturally-aspirated LT6 showed up in a Z06 road car.
All of these teasers were possible because the car was planned so far in advance. The C8 lineup was always meant to include something as extreme as the ZR1, so every program along the way had room to integrate some elements of the ultimate Corvette. That road led here: to a thousand-plus horsepower, mid-engined beast meant to reach over 215 miles per hour. The new ZR1 may be the ultimate Corvette, but only because many other Corvettes made it possible along the way.
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