dcbingaman

Those NA McLaren's were special cars, though. They had big power (800 HP) AND they could handle ! The Porsche was just a brute force approach and had sooooo much torque it was hard to keep the rear wheels from spinning out of every curve. Fortunately Mark Donahue was a good enough driver to keep the beast under control, but you wonder how many other guys would have crashed the thing.


This chassis would make for a great C8 too - but it might be too wide to fit in your garage, LOL.

FAUEE

A lot has been. Made of the 100hp difference, but everyone seems to be missing the point of it. The ZR1 has more power BECAUSE IT COOLS BETTER. Powertrains now days are more limited by cooling abity than anything else. It takes a lot to cool down cars making 400+ no, with forced Induction, or spinning to high rpms.

What everyone must have missed at the Rolex 24 was the very real fear that the midengine Caddys may not finish the race to win. The single biggest drawback to a mode fine layout is cooling, because it's REALLY hard to pull off. All the cool air is in front of the car, and to cool an engine in the middle requires a lot more surface area to gather air for your cooling.

Whatever the mid engine car is (I think it's a caddy, not a Corvette), it will likely be down in hp quite a bit from the C7. It's highly possible that base versions of it will have less hp than a c7 or maybe even c6. It is highly unlikely the ME car will be faster than a c7zr1 around a track, and very plausible to think it won' be able to stay cool on a warm track day, based on GM undercooling previous high performance cars...

rgregory

I thought the Caddy’s had no issues the year before. It was a different engine displacement for this year, smaller displacement might have been working harder.

My Gallardo has done track events in the Texas summers and never had a cooling issue. Having dry sump with larger oil capacity and an oil cooler certainly help. I was able to drive it hard the full 20 minutes sessions. With my C5Z I never could run 20 minutes without having to slow down due to oil temps getting over 300 degrees.

My Gallardo is a 2004 the ZO6 was a 2003 so it is a fair comparison that no matter what the layout it can be cooled properly. It isn’t inherent to just the layout. The Gallardo is 500hp the z06 was 405. So the mid engine 100 hp higher car stayed cooler on the track.

FAUEE

The Gallardo also cost something like 4 or 5 times as much as the c5z did?

It's not that it can't be overcome, it just costs money, space, and weight. People won't pay Lambo .mney for a GM. They won't pay even close to it.

My point is, to hit a price point that GM can play in, they're going to have to downsize their power output compared to a c7z or c7zr1. It may make less power than a base c7 or even c6 to stay cool.

rgregory

I know it costs more but that doesn’t mean Lamborghini spends as much on development as GM. I have built a big block Camaro, very modded that never overheated even when 100 here... large aluminum radiator. In college we designed formula SAE cars and we came up with the right cooling requirements. Radiators are not heavy nor expensive, better to have some overkill. I race cars and my buddy that builds the race car it has enough cooling to handle 8 hour endurance races.

I don’t think they should have any issue making a ME car not overheat and it should not cost much money. Even if they go with dual radiators, a radiator doesn’t cost GM probably much more than $150.