Corvette Assembly Plant Resumes Operations as UAW Returns to Work
After the United Auto Workers approved their new four-year labor contract with General Motors, workers in Bowling Green, KY returned to the Corvette Assembly Plant on Monday where production resumed on the final 2019 Corvettes.
Not everyone was in favor of the new deal as 56% of GM plant workers in Bowling Green voted against the negotiated contract, but Local 2164 president Jack Bowers believes its good to get back to work.
“I think they’re feeling, you know, that they’re glad they are back to work, but they would have liked to see more things they wanted in the contract,” said Local 2164 President, Jack Bowers. “That speaks for how close the votes were and some of the ‘no’ votes, but at the end of the day it’s going to be good everyone gets back to work.”
![[VIDEO] Corvette Assembly Plant Resumes Operations as UAW Returns to Work](https://i0.wp.com/www.corvetteblogger.com/images/content/2019-3/102919_5b.jpg?w=590&ssl=1)
Plant spokesperson Rachel Bagshaw tells us that work will continue on the C7 Corvette through mid-November before taking a scheduled three-week break to retool the plant for the new 2020 Corvette.
“We’re back right now producing the seventh generation corvette,” said Rachel Bagshaw, Communication Manager for the General Motors Corvette Plant. “We are going to undergo some launch related downtime that’s between the weeks of November 18th through December 6th.”
Source: WBKO.com
2020 Corvette C8 Gets Its First Lego Build, Probably Not Last
Plus a set of step-by-step instructions from the maker himself.
The 2020 Corvette C8 is probably one of the most popular cars this year. Its performance figures matched with an affordable price tag warrant the attention that it has been getting since its reveal. The problem is, those who would like to get their hands on one will have to wait until next year since Chevrolet will commence deliveries in 2020.
If patience isn’t your strongest suit, well, there’s this – 1:20 scale of the Corvette C8 made out of Lego bricks. This isn’t made out of pre-fabricated brick, though. This Lego build by Lasse Deleuran isn’t an official Corvette C8 set but with regular bricks, rather.
Read full story at deBotech
Source: Lasse Deleuran (BrickHub) via The Brothers Brick
2020 Ferrari 488 GT3 to challenge the Corvette C8.R
Ferrari used its Finali Mondiali motorsport gathering held at the Mugello circuit in Italy over the weekend to debut its 2020 488 GT3 Evo race car.
Even though the 488 GTB was replaced in showrooms earlier this year by the F8 Tributo, the car is set to continue on the racetrack in 2020 and potentially beyond. The 488 GT3 Evo, as the name suggests, is an evolution of the 488 GT3 that started racing in 2016, and it’s been designed to compete in GT classes of the World Endurance Championship and WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, meaning we’ll see it compete head-to-head with Chevrolet’s new Corvette C8.R. The first race will be next January’s Rolex 24 at Daytona, the opening round of the 2020 WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. The Evo’s upgrades over the current 488 GT3 are extensive. According to Ferrari, aerodynamics, dynamics, ergonomics, safety and reliability were the main areas of development. This included the addition of a longer wheelbase aimed at reducing tire wear, a revised front section for better cooling and downforce, and a new seat that helps save weight. Over 18,000 hours were spent developing the new front fascia alone.
The engine, a twin-turbo V-8, is carried over from the 488 GT3 with only a new management system that helps deliver torque in a smoother, more linear fashion and also improves reliability.
Deliveries of the 488 GT3 Evo are expected to commence by the end of the year. Teams already with 488 GT3s will be able to upgrade to the Evo spec via an upgrade kit to be offered by Ferrari.
Source: MotorAuthority
2020 CORVETTE C8’S HORSEPOWER, TORQUE FIGURES MAY BE SERIOUSLY UNDERRATED
Officially, the mid-engine 2020 Chevrolet Corvette’s 6.2-liter naturally aspirated V8 produces 495 hp and 470 lb-ft of torque at 6,450 rpm and 5,150 rpm, respectively. But a series of dyno pulls Motor Trend performed on a test car suggest that it could produce more — much more.
The publication managed to strap one of the Corvettes to a dynamometer and was surprised to record 558 hp and 515 lb-ft of torque at the wheels; assuming a 15 percent drivetrain loss, that works out to an estimated output of 656 hp and 606 lb-ft. (And even assuming an impossible zero percent drivetrain loss, the V8 was still putting out way more than the official numbers.)
Further pulls revealed similar numbers, so this wasn’t a one-off anomaly — something is up here. The possibilities as we see it:
– Chevrolet is dramatically underrating its engines
– This particular press car has been tuned to put out much more than your average stock 2020 Corvette will produce
– Differences between testing methodologies used by Motor Trend and Chevrolet, and/or conditions on the day of testing, account for the difference
– The dyno Motor Trend used is way out of whack
Underrating engines is not an unheard-of practice, but that shouldn’t be the case here: The new Corvette engine’s output has been independently certified by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). So the horsepower and torque for the model should be more or less known quantities.
Differences in testing methodologies could account for the gap between stated and apparent output. Of the SAE’s approach, Motor Trend writes:
“Their testing does not involve a simple pull from idle to redline, either. Rather, rpm are slowly ramped up and allowed to stabilize before accelerating further. This process results in significantly more heat generation than any single pull from our six dyno runs. For that reason, the engineers say, it’s not uncommon for single chassis dyno pulls to register higher output (and it is extremely unlikely any car will ever generate less than rated output).”
So that could explain some of the discrepancies, but we’re not talking about a few percentage points difference here. Could the problem be in the dyno? That’s certainly possible — dynamometers are great for showing relative increases in power (e.g., boosted output after an engine has been tuned or otherwise modified) but shouldn’t be automatically trusted to provide accurate baseline figures.
But Motor Trend says it’s taken that into account:
“The dyno we used complies with the SAE J1349 procedures, and we’ve used it multiple times in the past. To prove there wasn’t a problem with the dyno, we ran a 2020 Ram 2500 Limited powered by the 6.7-liter turbodiesel Cummins engine, which produces 850 lb-ft of torque but is not SAE-certified. The dyno read 760 lb-ft at the wheels, which means there’s about 890 lb-ft at the crank, much closer to the numbers Ram claims.”
Head to the Motor Trend article to see all the numbers, check out the dyno test reports and read more about the test methodology. There’s some speculation about what may be behind the higher output, including the possibility that the publication’s test car was punched up by Chevy. Until publications can test multiple cars on multiple dynos, we won’t have any real sense of what’s going on.
You can read our first drive of the 2020 Corvette here; we haven’t managed to strap one to a dyno just yet, but be on the lookout for more drives and impressions of the car in the coming days.
Souce: Graham Kozak, AutoWeek
2020 C8 Chevy Corvette spins up an eye-popping mystery on the dyno
The intrigue around the 2020 Chevrolet Corvette isn’t close to ending. Motor Trend secured a pre-production build of America’s sports car for two weeks of testing, including a trial at the Hyundai-Kia proving grounds for MT’s Car of the Year roundup. It was treated like a priceless museum exhibit on loan: MT staffers kept the Corvette throughout the day, then returned the coupe to Chevy’s PR team every night. The day before handing the car back to Chevy for good, the magazine wanted to run a real-mpg test, but the testing company didn’t have equipment to deal with square tailpipes. So MT took the red Z51 coupe to its local, oft-used dyno for what would turn out to be six confounding runs. The numbers after the first run in fifth gear run: 558 horsepower and 515 pound-feet of torque. At the wheels.
Assuming parasitic driveline losses of 15% would mean the Corvette was putting out around 656 hp and 606 lb-ft at the crank. If we assume a 10% loss, the crank figures come to about 620 hp and 570 lb-ft. Either set represents a shocking surplus over the Corvette’s official rating 495 hp and 470 lb-ft. And the official rating isn’t Chevy putting its best foot forward — GM pays to have the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) certify its output figures using the SAE’s strict protocols.
Having been thrown this stumper, MT personnel tried to sleuth it out. They called their road test editor. They called Chevrolet engineers. Their technical editor did some math. They put a 2020 Ram 2500 diesel on the dyno as a control vehicle. They spoke to Chevy engineers again and got revised gear ratios taking the limited-slip differential into account. They got explanations from those engineers about what might be happening. They performed five more runs, two of them in sixth gear even though fifth gear was the closest to a 1:1 ratio. The lowest figures came during run number five, posting 478 hp and 536 lb-ft at the wheels. Even at just 10% of parasitic losses, that’s 530 hp and a mongo 597 lb-ft of torque.
At the moment, none of the numbers add up, and none of the explanations can explain them. Head to Motor Trend to read the whole story. All we know for now is that there’ll be a lot more Corvettes put on a lot more dynos before this is through. Whenever GM can start building C8 Corvettes, that is.
Source: Johnathan Ramsey, Autoblog.
The 2020 Corvette C8 Beats These 10 Amazing Cars in our Figure-Eight Test
We had a good feeling the 2020 Chevrolet C8 Corvette’s move to a mid-engine layout would improve performance, but somehow we didn’t think the results would be so dramatic. Our 3LT trim tester equipped with the Z51 package lapped our figure eight course in 23.3 seconds at 0.90 g, placing it in lofty company. How lofty? To give you an idea, here are just 10 of the heavy-hitting performance cars the C8 Corvette beat around the figure-eight course, a MotorTrend test that evaluates cornering, acceleration, braking, and the transitions in between.
2011 Porsche 911 GT3 RS
Porsche’s RS cars have always enjoyed life at the top of the 911 hierarchy, and that was true for the 997-generation GT3 RS, which was outranked only by the GT2 RS and GT3 RS 4.0. In testing, that car laid down a figure-eight lap of 23.4 seconds at an average of 0.92 g, with help from its 450-hp 3.8-liter naturally aspirated flat-six and sweet-shifting six-speed manual transmission. That kind of performance easily made it worthy of the RS badge in its day, but who could have guessed a “base” Corvette would surpass it 10 years later? If beating a decade-old GT3 RS doesn’t impress you, the C8 also tied a 2018 Porsche 911 Carrera T’s figure-eight time, though at higher average g-forces.
2016 Mercedes-AMG GT S
The Mercedes-AMG GT S was our 2015 Best Driver’s Car winner, and for good reason. The then-new front-engine sports car surprised everyone on Route 198 with the level of confidence it inspired. “By the end of the program, it grew obvious that the AMG GT S was greater than the sum of its parts,” we wrote at the time. “Part Palm Springs weekend getaway car, part mountain road menace, and part track star, and wholly incomparable.” The GT S’ 23.4-second figure-eight time doesn’t tell the whole story about its driving experience, but the fact that the Corvette C8 beat that is still impressive.
2013 Dodge SRT Viper
The Viper and Corvette are longtime American sports car rivals. Up until the C8’s arrival and the Viper’s unfortunate discontinuation in 2016, both were muscular front-engine, rear-drive coupes designed and built in the U.S., so how could we not compare the two? With its 640-hp, 600-lb-ft 8.4-liter naturally aspirated V-10, the base SRT Viper was more of a match for the C7 Z06 in its day. But a generation later, a lesser Z51 model is capable of besting its figure-eight time of 23.4 seconds.
2019 Jaguar XE SV Project 8
Jaguar’s Special Vehicle Operations team pulled out all the stops when it developed the XE SV Project 8. Thanks in part to a 5.0-liter supercharged V-8 producing 592 hp and 516 lb-ft of torque, the Project 8 is the fastest four-door car around the Nürburgring Nordschleife. Another SV innovation that no doubt helped the Project 8 capture the ‘Ring record is the car’s dual-mode suspension that can switch from Street to Track at the push of a button. In Street mode, the Project posted a figure-eight time of 23.4 seconds, a tenth of a second slower than the C8 Corvette Z51. But even set to Track mode, the Project 8 only manages to tie the ‘Vette.
2006 Saleen S7 Twin Turbo
If you could travel back in time to the early 2000s and ask any car enthusiast which five cars would fill their dream garage, chances are high that the Saleen S7 would be among the answers you get. Designed by Steve Saleen to put America back on the supercar map, the S7 took on the giants of the day both in showrooms and on the track with the S7R, which competed at Le Mans throughout the first decade of the new millennium. In 2005, the S7 got a major upgrade in the form of a 7.0-liter twin-turbo V-8 rated at 750 hp. With that power infusion, the low-volume Saleen S7 Twin Turbo completed our figure-eight course in 23.4 seconds at an average of 0.90 g. In a way, the C8 Corvette beating that time is like the passing of the torch from one American supercar icon to another.
2010 Corvette ZR1
Just as the Saleen S7 was a poster car of the 2000s, the C6 Chevy Corvette ZR1 was kind of a big deal during the first half of this decade. Nicknamed the “Blue Devil,” the C6 ZR1 packed a 6.2-liter supercharged LS9 V-8 that produced 638 hp and 604 lb-ft of torque—at the time an unfathomable amount for a mass-produced car. The ZR1 lapped our figure eight in 23.4 seconds at an average of 0.87 g. The fact that a C8 Z51 beat the top model of the C6 generation in this metric (and others) further illustrates just how far the Corvette has come.
2017 Audi R8 V10 Plus
When the second-generation Audi R8 first came out, few thought it would be as good as its platform-mate, the Lamborghini Huracán. But the everyday supercar’s performance was much closer to the Lambo’s than anyone could have expected. When we tested a 2017 Audi R8 V10 Plus, it accelerated from 0 to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds, making it the quickest naturally aspirated car we had ever tested at the time. It also lapped the figure eight in 23.5 seconds, which is indeed fast—just not as fast as the new C8 Corvette.
2019 Aston Martin DBS Superleggera
We called the DBS Superleggera “the most beautiful Aston Martin since … ever” in our First Drive. On top of that, it’s an incredible grand tourer packing a sonorous 715-hp 5.2-liter twin-turbo V-12. It may not be an all-out super sports car like some others on this list, but it is one of the priciest entries starting at just over $308,000. The DBS Superleggera beats the C8 Corvette in plushness and arguably in looks, but with a lap time of 23.6 seconds, it doesn’t beat it around our figure eight.
2010 Ferrari 458 Italia
The Ferrari 458 Italia and 2020 Chevrolet Corvette C8 have a surprising amount in common. Both are mid-engine and powered by naturally aspirated V-8s mated to dual-clutch transmissions, and both look great in red. Even months after the C8 Corvette’s debut, it’s still incredible to us that such comparisons between a Corvette and our 2011 Best Driver’s Car winner can be made. What’s more incredible is that the Corvette was three tenths of a second faster than the Ferrari around the figure eight. What a difference a decade makes.
2012 Lexus LFA
The Lexus LFA was a prime example of a halo car. Toyota spent millions developing a robotic loom that could weave carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic into body components and a full monocoque chassis—all for one car. Producing the LFA required a dedicated facility where the cars would be hand-built at a rate of about 20 units a month. Just 500 examples of the front-engine, 552-hp V-10 coupe were produced and sold for at least $375,000 a pop, making LFA ownership a very exclusive club. Though it won’t be nearly as rare or expensive, the C8 Corvette serves as a halo car for GM, a showcase of what its engineers, designers, bean counters (yes, we owe them thanks, too), and other employees can do. With that said, we think the LFA would be OK having its 23.7-second figure eight time beaten by another halo car worthy of the title.
Source: Alex Nishimoto- Motor Trend
2020 CORVETTE C8 STINGRAY Z51: FIRST DRIVE
What it does have is the ability to show Rolls-Royce how to tune a chassis: the new Vette genuinely rides like full-size luxury car. No car with sporting intention this side of McLaren’s Super Series of cars with trick hydraulic suspension even comes close to the suppleness of the Corvette.
Astonishing magnetorheological-damper ride quality aside, the C8’s driving experience is a radical departure from previous Vettes because its controls are delicate. The electrically assisted steering is light, the shift paddles don’t require much effort from your fingers, and the (brake-by-wire) left pedal won’t stress your thigh muscles. The experience is more Ferrari than C7, which was a big brute of a thing that had a heavy clutch, a shifter that could sprain a limp wrist, and enough driveline lash to remind you what the gritty side of Detroit still looks like.
Read more at deBotech!
Jason Cammisa, – Road and Track