ute.” Secrecy was paramount. At
GM’s Advanced Vehicle Integra-
tion facility in Warren, Michigan,
the company built a special room
for the C8 with restricted swipe-
card access. “If you talk to people
at GM, their memory of this car is
that it’s the car nobody would let
them see,” says Alex MacDonald,
Corvette vehicle performance
manager. The team used spot-
ters to watch for helicopters,
speeding back to a secret garage
called The Lair when there was
a threat of aerial photography.
At this stage, all that mat-
tered was the basic structure
and suspension geometry, the
foundation of the car.
“If you look at the wing,”
says Juechter, “it’s on upside
down. That’s because aero-
dynamics come into play on
suspension development at
relatively low speeds, and
this front end had a ton of
lift. So to get the pitch right, we
inverted the wing to add lift to
the rear.” Blackjack’s interior is
racecar-crude, its transmission
an adapted PDK from a Porsche.
But the foundation like struc-
ture and suspension was crucial,
determining everything that hap-
pened next. “We knew we only had
one chance to get this right,” says
Juechter. “Computer models get
us in the ballpark, but we have to
build hardware so we can learn.”
Among the things they
learned is that no supplier
on the planet had the high-
pressure die capacity to
handle the big pieces of the
C8’s front and rear struc-
ture. For Blackjack, they
milled those parts from
solid aluminum—7,000
pounds of metal to produce
400 pounds of components.
You can do that when you’re
building one car. But you
also need to consider how
you’re going to build thou-
sands of cars.
So, the team worked out
plans to make their structural
dreams production-feasible. But
in the meantime, they had to keep
testing. The car next to Blackjackis a mule from 2016. This one
has the correct dry-sump V8, the
correct GM-developed 8-speed
dual-clutch transmission, and the
next-gen electrical architecture
of the production car. But it’s still
one of a dozen cars largely hand-
built and still showing elements
of improv. “You still see some C7
structure here, where we could use
it,” says Juechter. “Like the doors.
One thing that’s really challeng-
ing is sealing. You’re going to be
testing in the rain, the car needs
to be sealed.” Hence the bits of
C7 cabin. But the body structure
underneath is real C8.
While these 12 cars were run-
ning around Milford, other C8
parts were being tested on current
Corvettes—the steering wheel, for
instance. Kim Lind, the team’s
additive design and manufactur-
ing product application engineer,
produced 3D-printed prototype
steering wheels—a feat made
possible by fusion deposition mod-
eling. “The wheel was a case where
we just had to try it out, live with
it and see what we thought,” saysTHE MID-ENGINE
DESIGN IS THE
BIGGEST DEAL
SINCE THE
CORVETTE GOT A
V8 IN 1955.“
Cars &
(^6) Trucks
COURTESY GM (RED CORVETTE)
20 September 2019 PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROY RITCHIE