Not that I am looking to do this with my own 1994 six speed coupe, but just how much weight can be taken off and how light can the car be while still being safe to operate and street legal? I dont even know how much my own coupe weighs. It cant be that much, i can roll it with relative ease. Anyhow, has anyone ever put thier own C4 on a diet, and what fighting weight did you get yours down to? What did you do to shave the extra pounds?

Just satisfying my own curiosity,
Cessnaguy

 

This is about as light as you can get.

http://www.hotrod.com/projectbuild/h...t/viewall.html

HR lays out some figures, but the way they did it was not really strategicly done for the same goal as yours.

Take their bottom line number and just start adding in the necessary parts and body panels to make it streeet legal for your area and add that to the combined weights of those components to HR's total.

Then if you want some comfort start adding in the weights of those foo-foo components and I bet you can get close.

My guess would be 2,800-2,900 lbs. Of course my ideas of comfort and yours may differ greatly.

 

My 96 LT4 fully equipped including the F45 suspension. Muffler/resonator + jack and spare tire delete weighted at 3240LBS with 1/2 tank of gas and the targa top on...

 

When I weighed my 93 it was right about 3300lbs, with me in it. I don't remember how much fuel it had at the time.

So with me out of the car I would guess it weighs around 3000lbs.

 

Wow, heavier than I thought. I mistakenly figured it would be lighter because of the fiberglass. Although the Hot Rod article was interesting and humorous, I still dont like the way they cut it up with reckless abandon. It was still a Corvette, Americas supercar.

 

[QUOTE=bangbgC6;1584609835]This is about as light as you can get.

http://www.hotrod.com/projectbuild/h...t/viewall.html

He could have saved himself a lot of trouble and just got rid of the sawblades!

 

Shaving serious weight on a street car with creature comforts is going to cost you. I think the easiest and most common is to remove the spare/jack/lug wrench. From there it gets dicey. You would need to find lightweight forged racing wheels, etc. From my Miata research a stock wheel can weigh 16 lbs for example. The same size "style" wheel can weigh double. A good forged wheel would weigh 10-12 lbs. Same with going to larger wheels. The larger wheels are heavier and may reduce performance.

In my motorcycle days, it was popular to use aluminum fasteners for non stress bearing parts and to replace steel with Titanium. The titanium is very expense. We had a motorcycle racer put titanium all over his bike and reduce the weight by about 25%. Cars have much more stress so I'm not sure if it would work at this point. I'd love to replace my vert's X brace bolts with ti for starters, but I'm not sure of the stresses.

 

There's a guy with a very modified track car that weighs in a bit over 2800 pounds. No AC, no windows, lightweight hood and lexan pieces, gutted interior, etc.

Keep in mind, there's a big weight difference in early C4s and later C4s. His was an early C4.

The massive hood weighs a lot, replacing that is helpful especially if you remove the flip up headlights. Seats also weigh a lot, so replacing them with lighter racing seats can help. Interior panels can add up to quite a bit of weight, as can things like sound proofing. If you want to get really crazy you can start removing non-essential things like AC, radio, power locks, windows, etc.

 

Take a look at a Miata--a NB is about 2300 lbs. Each part of the car is about half the size of the Vette from the engine which is one bank of a small V8 to the suspension pieces. The Miata doesn't a have anything really in it in regards to power seats, lumbar, gadgets, etc.
So to put it into perspective the C4 is amazingly light for what you get. The design team went through great pains to get as much aluminum in the design as possible and this was unheard of at GM at the time. So we're really lucky to have what we have. The engine is a huge lump of iron and the car was built around that. To capture all the torque and handle the tires got wider, the brakes bigger, the diff stronger, etc. It's all about the V8.

To put in perspective, at least we don't have to deal with the 3900 lb Camaro or 4300 lb Challenger.

My perfect Corvette:
I always through Chevy should sell a stripped Corvette separate model with no options to save weight. Smaller wheels, etc as well. Put in an all aluminum 300 HP 3.5-4.0L engine with a 7500 RPM redline. Get the 0-60 in the 5.0 sec range and 1/4 mile time in the 13.2. Get the weight down to below 3000 lbs. Get it to handle like it's on rails.

I think the trend towards hyper performance takes the fun out of the car on the street. My 1000 CC sport bike ran easy 10's in the 1/4 mile. On the street (in town) it was boring to short shift or wind up 1st gear and then shift to 5th. On the open road it was another story . I added a 650CC bike to the stable and wrung the hell out of it even though I was going slower and had a great time.

 

This is what you do to shed a noticeable amount of weight on any C4.
Remove: Spare tire and mounting hardware
Exhaust system to the headers
Glass trunk
Targa top
​​​​​​ Passenger seat
Headlight assembly with motors
Nearly 300lbs gone. Hope this helped someone 🫡