From 7,000 Pounds Of Aluminum To A Fake Pickup In GM's Secret Garage To (Finally) The New Mid-engine Corvette

ABOUT FOUR AND a half years ago, I drove the then-new Corvette Z06 at a track in Nevada.

- Ezra Dyer

With 650 horsepower, the Z06’s rear tires struggled to cope with a firestorm of torque dispatched by the massive V8 sitting out ahead of the cockpit. For all its superlative capabilities, the Z06 needed more traction, more weight on the rear end. I told Tadge Juechter, Corvette executive chief engineer, “I think to do any better than this, you need to go mid-engine.” He assumed a look of weary annoyance and replied, “Yeah, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.” Which, you’ll note, was not a denial.

Juechter had a good poker face, because back in Michigan, he and a team of engineers had been working on such a car since 2013. Disguised to look like a mutant Australian pickup truck, it was code-named Blackjack. Under its Holden bodywork, Blackjack was teaching GM how to build a whole new kind of Corvette.

With the mid-engine Corvette finally upon us, I kept thinking about that first rough-hewn test car, which was caught by a spy photographer soon after I drove the Z06. What happened since then? And how did we get from that freaky one-off development car to a production Corvette? I asked GM whether they still had Blackjack and any other vehicles from the development pipeline— physical snapshots of where they were years ago, cars that show what kind of obstacles they overcame on the way to the polished end product. In the case of a normal mass-market car, GM probably wouldn’t have retained a fossil record of its development. But the mid-engine design is the biggest deal since the Corvette got a V8 in 1955, so GM had the foresight to keep some development cars around. They agreed to convene four of those cars and four key engineers in one room so we could retrace the path that led to the 2020 C8 Corvette.