The Secret Ingredient Powering the C6 Z06: Balsa Wood

Chevy says they have been using this curious material for Corvette components since 1997. Did you know about it?

At its debut, the C6 Z06 was the fastest Chevy Corvette ever made. Not only did this vehicle offer the legendary LS7 with a massive 7.0 liters of displacement, but it also had some more unconventional tricks up his sleeve. To cut weight, GM engineers used Balsa wood. You might be thinking, how the hell is a material used for model airplanes sufficient to withstand the stresses of a sports car chassis? Thanks to an article by Automotive News, we find exactly how this wood is used in the C6 Z06.

Believe it or not, the floor of the Corvette is made up of a balsa wood / carbon fiber composite material. GM, effectively, sandwiched Balsa wood between layers of carbon fiber. This allows for increased structural rigidity while removing weight. How big is this piece of wood in the vehicle? According to the article, it stretches 4 feet long and is 1.5 feet wide while being 3/8ths of an inch thick. That is just about the full span of the flooring within a Corvette chassis.

Why Balsa wood out of all the available materials? According to Chevy, Balsa has the strongest weight-to-strength ratio of any readily available wood. This particular Balsa wood was also locally sourced from New Jersey. Supposedly, this carbon fiber-balsa composite is stronger than steel or aluminum for the application.

By the way, how much weight was exactly is saved by this innovation? Just 4.4 pounds.

You might be thinking, they went through all that trouble just to save the equivalent weight of a two-liter bottle of soda? That’s what it takes to win races. The original idea for the Balsa wood came from NASA. Chevy has since used balsa wood technology since the late nineties in the Corvette. We wouldn’t be surprised if they still do today.

Photos: Corvette Forum

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