Gemini fees too high full#

The center exit actually has that happen outside the car. MacDonald: The difficulty of making a great sound in a V8 or muscle car is in the way you do an X-pipe over the two banks of cylinders. It not only created the noise that we thought was best from the outside, but it sent it forward into the car.

Gemini fees too high full#

Juechter: Full credit to Alex’s team for developing an amazing exhaust system that mounts these quad-reverse megaphones under the lower fascia. The LT6 makes really glorious sounds, and we wanted to be sure the people in the car could hear the symphony. Lee: We wanted the Z06 to tantalize all of your senses - what you see, hear, and feel. You could do all-wheel drive, except that doesn’t work well with our front-engine layout there’s no place for driveshafts. The C7 Z06 was a great car, but the front-engine layout limited the amount of power we could get to the ground. We all had to swallow hard and admit laws of physics might not let us exceed that with a naturally aspirated V8. We knew when we started down this path that we might not exceed the horsepower of the C7 Z06, which was 650 horsepower. Historically, new Corvettes outperform old ones, and we typically see a horsepower bump as part of that. Juechter: However, we were also taking on a massive risk. But for the C8 Z06, I think all of us immediately recognized this as another opportunity to build an amazing car around this super-special naturally aspirated engine. Then the C7 moved toward something more powerful with the addition of the supercharged LT4. I think everybody recognizes the LS7-powered Z06 as a very successful naturally aspirated raw track car. Our mantra is to make decisions together that are the best decisions for the customer and stretch ourselves to push the limits of what is possible.Īlexander MacDonald: I first joined GM around the time the LS7 was part of Z06, back when we launched the C6. We’re friends outside of work, we go to Corvette events together - it’s almost like an extended family. At Corvette, we are much closer than that. Requirements that are confidently achievable are written down, and the engineers set off to work on them. Tadge Juechter: Historically, the whole engine side of the business kind of operates at arm’s length from the rest of the company. The fact that this was our moonshot - essentially, the most complicated and sophisticated engine we’ve ever come up with - made Gemini the perfect name for us. Gemini is Latin for twins, and the engine carries that theme with two intake plenums, two throttle bodies, two camshafts per cylinder head, etc. We really liked that astronauts in the late ’60s and ’70s drove Corvettes they got a pretty lucrative deal I think to lease the car for a dollar a year. We were looking for a name that would stick with us. Small Block history is “near and dear” to Corvette, so we kept our historic 4.4-inch bore center dimension. So: Double overhead cams, four valves per cylinder, unique cylinder block, and a sophisticated dry sump lube system. We wanted an engine that was true to the Corvette DNA and yet unlike any conventional Small Block engine that we’ve done in the past. Jordan Lee: We built our first prototypes in September 2015. We sat down with all three as they discussed the challenges that came with building their dream Corvette. This rocket launch is the endgame of a seven-year passion project for a Corvette development team that includes Corvette executive chief engineer Tadge Juechter, global powertrain/engine chief engineer Jordan Lee, and Corvette vehicle performance manager Alexander MacDonald. Plus, a set of massive twin-throttle bodies, a variable tuned intake manifold, and a glorious quad exhaust.

The result? The world’s most powerful naturally aspirated production V8, producing an eye-popping 670 horsepower at 8400 rpm. So big, in fact, that development of the Z06’s 5.5-liter LT6 engine was nicknamed Project Gemini, a nod (in part) to NASA’s early manned spaceflight program in the 1960s. In the age of turbo- and electric-boosted four-bangers, General Motors chose to go bold when it came time to power the 2023 Corvette Z06.