JD'S WHITE 93

Good thing you’re here to post what you read about the C8 on motor trend.com Tell us more 😂

JD'S WHITE 93

They were bad *** for their time, it’s really that simple.

Tom400CFI

^True.

And in the hands of a GOOD driver, they'll 0-60 faster than the mags have stated. The C4 is a very "driveable" car. Meaning, it's an honest, straight forward driving experience that gives you back exactly what you put into it. So? Well driven, the cars did/do pretty well.

On the flip side...remember when 0-60 times mattered and were a hotly debated/compared thing??

SH-60B

Way ahead of the C3 in chassis design and handling. Power? Probably similar at first.

VikingTrad3r

any chance i get to sing the praises of the L98 on the road track, i take.

most guys never take a car to the track (to my surprise!!!!!its a riot!!) but an L98 in the powerband is completely fine on track. Its up to the driver to keep it there specifically on downshifts, learning rev match shifting (i grin every time i nail a rev match downshift that dumps just inside the powerband).

keep it in the powerband right around 3500 and use the 330ftlbs thats there for u. If you have an LT1, you will be doing the exact same thing but the powerband is higher. You as the driver control where you are using your stick.

If you are on a course with a lonng long straight away you will still be fine on a L98 but u will be in a higher gear at the end of it or u will have fallen on your face at 5000rpm. Learn to shift, learn to be quick with your feet.

Think of it like......Tom Cruise in the new TopGun (which is off the charts good)....he was such a good pilot that he knew how to extract the most out of the outdated Jet of his era.

Ofcourse im not saying that an L98 will run with a modern car. But ive personally seen an L98 have far faster lap times than an LS its all about extracting the juice out of the fruit. Technique.

People say L98’s are awesome street cars because you never get out of second gear and barely into 3rd. A street is like a track with no straight aways longer than the stoplight distance. .... just keep the engine in the powerband....and u can go to a decent straight.

Now COTA etc is another thing your L98 will get dusted. Where i live all road course tracks have didly for long straights.

L98 FTW, i love them. They give the next gen of Corvette owners a chance to get in cheap, they are rediculously easy to work on with home depot toolsets. Ive never owned an LT1 or and LT4 but i *really* look fwd to picking one up and learning that platform too. I went straight to LT5 and im in lllooooovvveeee.

And....4+3 rock. So do ZF’s.

get to the track baby!!!! its an addiction!!

GREGGPENN

This is the closest to explaining how I understand it. Until you hit straightaways where short-runner engines win on the back-end of the 1/4m, they can hang. In fact, they can win in the 1320 mark. I always thought C4's were in a league of their own (for the day) on auto-x tracks. If they "ruled" on tracks with much longer straight-aways, I'm not aware.

Otherwise, [back then] I gotta think there were plenty of short-runner cars running 300+ HP even if not made in America. Maybe I'm wrong.

OH YEAH....C4's were the first car to hit 1G on the skidpad. They could corner much better than all other cars of their era. And, that's one component of being "fast".

yakmastermax

Just my two cents, and it could be wrong, but I do not think power can be measured directly in a physical sense as far as I am aware. Whether we are talking about electrical power dissipated through a resistor, optical power incident upon a photodetector, or mechanical power either translational or rotational, what is actually measured is either an acceleration of a body over time, a force applied for a distance over time, a torque applied for a rotational displacement over time, a photocurrent converted to a power using a calibration factor, or the product of a voltage drop (measured) and a current (measured).
In all these cases power is calculated from the "real" "physical" measured quantities in question.

MatthewMiller

We've been through this before, yak. Something like "acceleration of a body over time" is literally the direct measurement of power, since power is Work/Time. Inertial dynos directly measure power exactly like this, and they don't need an RPM input to give you accurate power numbers. The do need an RPM input to give you accurate torque numbers, however. Therefore, they are calculating torque using the input values of power and RPM rather than calculating power with inputs of RPM and torque.

I don't really want to hijack this thread any further to go into that.

yakmastermax

Measuring the acceleration of an inertial body (roller or translational) over time given a previous measurement of its mass and measurement of the friction losses is a direct measurement of acceleration, not power. Power is then calculated from this direct measurement of acceleration using other directly measured quantities like mass.

Some calculated quantities can be directly measured. I am venturing to say that power is not one of those things. This isn't to say power isn't real. It is a very real physical quantity. Just as far as I am aware there are no direct measurements of it, in the technical physicist sense.

MatthewMiller

It doesn't have to measure acceleration. It just has to know the change in kinetic energy over the time interval: Power=(K1-K2)/(T1-T2).

I think at this point, it's just a semantic discussion. I maintain that power is directly observable and measurable. For example, if I burn a gallon of gas over an hour of time vs blowing it all up as a vapor in a fraction of a second, the same work was done but the power will be massively different and will feel massively different. But the main thing is that we both understand power to be a "very real physical quantity." Too many people talk about power as some abstract quality that has no real meaning, and follow on to say that an engine's torque output is what matters, and that's just not the case at all.

yakmastermax

I think we agree handily!
Power is a critical thing to consider and to "measure".
FWIW in the case of power as calculated from a change in kinetic energy over time, presumably in the case of an inertial dyno, the measured quantity of interest is the angular velocity of the roller.

GREGGPENN

Wow...I'm almost to my 20th year in this forum. FINALLY someone has figured out the reason TPI's are so fast!

And, here I always thought it came down to the typical argument of HP v TQ!

Tom400CFI

I agree! The forum FINALLY reveals the truth! "TPIs" are fast b/c they look cool!

(This thread was actually about C4's)

kael

*sigh* Don't forget, the early L98 C4 was even more impressive when TURNING the steering wheel! For those not aware, back in history, they were banned from the SCCA due to their performance whipping all other cars.

http://showyourcorvette.com/history.php

GREGGPENN

Thanks for posting that link, Kael. Somehow, the original post -- asking about 0-60 times morphed into what's shown in your link...at least in my mind. That's because talk of TPIs being good cars inevitably results in bashing them because they don't have "horsepower". When someone asks why early TPI C4's were considered "fast", the facts in the SCCA link are what I usually think of. I also think Lingenfelter's Superram played a huge role in early TPI "greatness" -- which is more similar to the "powerband" of an LS intake.

With apologies to Yakmaster, for interuping with my inane scarcasm, the Superram and long-runner intakes are often better for maintaining more power "under the curve" in class events like Auto-x/SCCA. In this forum, mrc24x's racing record is testiment to that. When forum members get to bashing TPIs in favor of the LTx cars, just point them to that SCCA link! If that doesn't work, LSx platform links! LOL All Corvettes are worthy!

MatthewMiller

Nobody was bashing anything. We were answering the OP's question by pointing out that C4s with stock L98s are exactly as quick as one would predict 0-60mph from their weight, grip, and power.

And your little quotation marks around "horsepower" are exactly what I meant when I replied to yak that too many people believe power is a made-up, abstract concept that doesn't really predict vehicle performance. And that's dead wrong, and he agrees, and he's a physicist. Power is real and, by its very definition, it is predictive of vehicle performance. A torque number is not.

Stock L98 C4s were fast in their day because the competition also didn't have much power. In race trim, they weren't stock and they were making quite a bit more power...as were the competition. In fact, that competition often had it easier because they were turbocharged (e.g. 944T and Lotus Esprit) and could find creative ways to...well...cheat. But the road racing prowess of the C4 had dick all to do with the L98 being a good engine for road racing in stock form: it wasn't. And an LT1/4 would have been worlds better for that.

If you mean the Superram fixed the glaring problem with the L98 by getting rid of the silly long-tube intake, then I agree!

That's simply not true.
Nobody has said otherwise. You're arguing with a straw man.

kael

Quoting from linked story:

"The 1988-1989 Corvette Challenge series came about because, in the Sports Car Club of America's (SCCA) Showroom Stock GT category, Corvette had no challengers. From the fourth generation Corvette's introduction in 1984 through the 1987 season Corvette's combination of superior handling, excellent brakes, sticky Goodyear "Gatorback" VR50 tires and the Small Block V8's power and torque ran away and hid from its Showroom Stock competition."

Stock, not tweaked.

Tom400CFI

It would be interesting to explore this. The claims made about this topic run the gamut. I've read/heard anything from STOCKITY-STOCK, to 350hp.
Now, here is what this guy knows:
*They didn't race them with cats and I'd bet that they didn't use muff's either. If you watch YT vids of era races, the cars are loud. So... right off we know...that ain't STOCK. They did not drive them out of a show room, and onto the track.
*Conversely, Ain't no stock headed, stock cammed L98 making 350 NET CHP with stock heads/intake/cam. No way, no how, not happening.

MY guess is that they used a blueprinted long block (to me, ""blueprinted" could be interpreted to include head porting and cam timing), open exhaust/no cats, ported stock manifolds, custom tune, and some "Free mods" like a real CAI.

With that in mind, I could buy a claim of ~280 NET CHP....MAYbe a number approaching 300 if head porting happened. But that's pushing it in my mind and a number above that is either boastful fantasy or GROSS CHP.

Documentation showing otherwise, welcome!

Kevova

Challenge cars had the original engines swapped out for challenge engines during race preparation, the original engines were tagged and "supposed" to be reinstalled at the end of the season.

MatthewMiller

Uhhh, yeah. Whatever story that is, it's full of ****. They didn't race on stock Gatorbacks in SCCA's Showroom Stock, and they could replace things like the cat-back exhaust, shocks, and brake pads. Hell, we could even replace those things in autocross Stock classes! Besides, this doesn't say anything about how they were/weren't prepped for the Challenge series (which was a whole different thing). I know for a fact that in the Challenge series they used clutch pressure plates with higher clamping pressure and a lightened friction surface...because I had one in my C4. They would have only needed more clamping force if they were making more power than stock, too. My guess is that Tom has it about right.

ETA: It's important to not let this take away from the excellence of the C4 in its day. It did in fact dominate SS while it was still allowed, beating out sports cars from other countries that cost quite a bit more. None of those cars are quick or fast by today's standards, either. In 1990, the SCCA started the Escort World Challenge. The Corvette mostly squared off against the Lotus Esprit Turbo, which inexplicably was suddenly faster on straights despite not being faster in stock form. But when you have a turbo, you can chea...err...optimize things. And the SCCA kept adding ballast to the C4 to give the Lotus a chance. The Corvette still won most of the races. It was just a great road course in every way, and was fast in its day. We should keep in mind that the Ferrari supercar of that time, the Testarossa, still only had 385hp and ran the quarter in 13.5 at 107mph...or about as fast as a new V6 Camaro today.