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First 2015 Chevy Corvette Z06 Engine Destroyed With Just 891 Miles On The Clock

Motor Authority

All of those reports about power being down on early examples of the 2015 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 due to the ongoing break-in process (with full power to come just a few hundred miles down the road) aside, there are worse things that can happen with a new supercar engine. For example, they can lunch themselves with just 891 miles on the odometer.

Today we mourn the first known 2015 Z06 engine to die.

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As reported by the gang over at Corvette Forum, the owner, known to the forum as Lawdogg, was out putting miles on the car to get it properly broken in before a track event scheduled for January 10-11, 2015, at Road Atlanta. Making a pull from 35 mph, the owner says “I shifted short of redline and boom — the car began knocking. I pulled over and popped the hood. I could hear a loud knock coming from the No. 6 cylinder area along with a serious, grinding, metal-on-metal sound coming from the supercharger area.”

In other words, the engine is toast, a fact confirmed by the dealer, which noted a failure in the No. 6 cylinder valvetrain. That’s as far as the dealer got, however, as the engine is being sent back to General Motors for factory-level analysis of the failure.

Right now, it’s not clear what caused the failure, but in a brand new engine with less than 1,000 miles on the odometer, there are only a couple of major possibilities: a manufacturing defect in this particular engine; or a driver error on the upshift (accidentally shifting to first instead of third during the pull, etc.).

Whatever the cause, the outcome is clear: this Z06 needs a new engine. Fortunately, it’s covered under warranty, and will be in the car shortly. For more details, be sure to visit the article at Corvette Forum as well as the original thread.

The first 2015 Z06 engine is dead; long live the (next) 2015 Z06 engine.