‘Motor Trend’ Revisits Corvette C8 Understeer on the Track
‘Motor Trend’ Revisits Corvette C8 Understeer on the Track
GM engineers offer Motor Trend a pair of Corvette C8 models with different alignments to see if track handling improves.
It was a debate that started innocently enough. Motor Trend magazine’s Kim Reynolds was performing some track testing with the new Corvette C8 on a figure-eight course. During the test, he noticed the Corvette understeering mid-corner, which was slowing the car down. He noted it to the Corvette engineer. Fast forward and GM invited Reynolds to Virginia International Raceway where the company had a pair of C8s, one with the stock suspension settings and the other with a track-oriented setup. Seasoned racer and auto journalist Randy Pobst was also on hand to give his opinion. Making the comparison even more interesting was the addition of the previous generation, front-engine C7 Corvette.
“So we were there fundamentally to see, could the understeer that we all experienced be changed?” says Reynolds in the above video. Chevy, for there part, altered the C8 for the track in two major ways versus stock.
- Dramatically increase front and rear negative camber
- Lowering the cold front-tire pressure by one pound
Stock C8s run a half degree of negative camber at all four corners, but the track-tuned C8 ran 3.0-degrees of negative camber up front and 2.5-degrees of negative camber in the rear. That’s significant in large part because C7 Corvettes were quite limited in their camber adjustment, a weakness Chevy engineers addressed in the mid-engine C8.
C7 Revisited
Stock C8
“A couple of things struck me,” said Pobst of the showroom stock C8. “One: very quick steering response. Like a razor, really quick, accurate steering response, followed by trailing throttle oversteer. I found that entering any corner where I was not braking and off-throttle the car oversteered. The next thing I noticed was that the car, from low speed, put power down very well. Next thing I noticed was coming out of the last corner onto the front straightaway there’s a long, increasing radius acceleration and about halfway to the exit I started getting power oversteer, which surprised me because the car has 495-hp which is good, but in today’s world that’s not crazy. And it was interesting to me that I would find power oversteer at 80 to 100-mph when I did not find power oversteer at 40 to 60 mph.” Pobst also that that C8 would “immediately change from tail-happy off-power to understeer on-power at the lower speeds.”
Track Setup C8
“I go out in the C8 with this new alignment, which is quite aggressive,” says Pobst. “You walk up and you know it immediately. And it absolutely reduced the understeer and guess what? It actually reduced oversteer as well. Grip was up on both ends of the car and the balance was better.”
So the Corvette engineers did manage to reduce the C8’s understeer and just make it better balanced all around. But as Pobst points out, why is it only possible with the extreme camber setting? “The gorilla in the room is, why do you need three degrees of camber to reduce this understeer?” he notes. “We drive lots of cars that are well-balanced and handle beautifully without radical amounts of camber.”
Motor Trend‘s Conclusions
In the end, Pobst and Reynolds agree on one thing: the new C8 is one amazing car.
“Something that’s very very important for us all to understand is that this really is a terrific car,” says Reynolds. “The first time I drove it, the first time I accelerated, braked and turned the first time I did that test my brain was lighting up with this is wonderful, it’s pure, it’s honest. This is a transformed Corvette. This is what it should have been all along, frankly. And what we’re doing here is kind of focusing a bit on something that we have questions about. So it may come across as we’re being negative or criticizing the car a lot. We really are not, we’re just looking at one detail and saying, hmm, what about that, maybe that could be better.”
Pobst agrees with the overall sentiment. “This Corvette C8 for me is a giant leap forward for the nameplate,” he says. “And we’re looking at kind of a minor turning point.”
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