VIDEO: Watch a C8 Z06 Engine Blow Up While Driving in the Canyons

A blast through the canyons abruptly ends for this poor driver after blowing his Z06 engine to bits before spewing oil all over the road.

The Z06 Gemini LT6 grew to infamous status as a rev-happy monstrosity. It’s a 90-degree 5.5L beast that revs up to an incredible 8,600 RPM, which produces some absolutely operatic sounds. Sounds which, when reverberating off canyon walls, make for an excellent driving experience. That’s not even counting the fact that you got 670 horsepower to play with, either. And all that under a partly-cloudy blue sky with a bunch of friends and some long, winding backroads? Sounds ripe for some spirited driving if you ask us. However, we stumbled across an article by Corvette Bloggerwhich says otherwise.

Sadly for this Corvette driver, their day came to an end when the car’s internal combustion engine became an external combustion engine. Captured on dashcam, the likely culprit’s been speculated as oil starvation, which makes sense given the trail of oil produced by the Corvette, as well as the audible rod knock as the filming driver passes. At around 2:15, smoke starts billowing out from the car. And 30 seconds later, the following vehicle radios his friend at a stop sign saying, “Your car’s on fire!”

Thankfully no one was hurt in the incident. The original video’s poster stated that he carries a pair of extinguishers on hand and they got the fire out with little incident. Small licks of flames appeared in the video for the briefest intervals but were largely not captured by the dashcam.

Unfortunately, we don’t know anything about this specific Z06 or the owner/driver. But in the video, the Z06 is clearly sporting a California dealership plate surrounded by a Corvette Mike license plate frame. CorvetteForum reached out to Corvette Mike, a Southern California Corvette retailer and specialist since 1982, for comment and spoke with General Manager Troy Worrell. Mr. Worrell indicated he had seen the video and that the Z06 in the video was not a vehicle from their current stock, but otherwise wasn’t able to comment because he doesn’t currently know the full story nor anything about this particular car. If Mr. Worrell learns more about the Z06 in question and is able to share any further details, he said he’d reach back out to the editorial staff here.

Needs Improvement?

This isn’t exactly the first of these incidents, either. Let’s take a far more prominent example: this poor owner whose Z06 “threw a rod and punctured the fuel tank” after just 4000 miles. That’s on top of a litany of transmission issues that caused no fewer than four failures. This problem even goes back to the first documented engine failure of a Z06 where an owner experienced eerily similar problems to our story today on the drive home from the dealership, of all times.

All in all, definitely an issue that needs to be addressed ASAP. Though certainly an anticipated one, considering it’s a brand-new engine and platform. Still, it’s a shame for the incredibly unlucky owners of these cars. And we can only hope that GM learns its lesson before more Z06s turn their engines inside-out.

Images: @Cars_and_Cats, YouTube & Michael S. Palmer