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That's quite interesting. My 2020 with NCM delivery on Sept 23 did NOT have it. My VIN is slightly higher than yours (9199). There are lots of articles online that said the C8 was supposed to get this engine plaque, but it did not appear in production until the 2021 model year,
It was a last minute thing that GM's President Mark Reuss at the time requested and they added it to one of the LT2 presentation slide decks in 2020. It was a nostalgic personal request because Chevy pushrod engines he'd personally worked on in the past had a similar plaque. I thought it was a cool Easter Egg to be excited about but was disappointed to see no models delivered with the plaque. Figured at worst case it wasn't feasible and got canceled or best case just needed more engineering time (formal test of materials/adhesive selection over long duration heat cycles rather than tacking on to production line last minute and praying for the best). I'd never heard of it reaching production for years since then so I wrote it off as canceled. Then when I got my MY23 late last year I was pleasantly surprised to see the plaque. That's despite others in this thread mentioning that it shipped in MY21 models. I honestly had no idea.
It's on my 2021 C8 but it's in a spot that you have to look from an angle to see it. The fuel rails are tough to clean because there's lots of hoses and wires to get down there so you really can't see it unless you hunt for it.
"The short answer is because Mark Reuss digs the Tonawanda badge, which was used in the 1960s on V-8 engines built at GM's Tonawanda plant in Buffalo, New York, and Reuss is what's known as an 'important person.' The executive also apparently has fitted similar badges to his own classic V-8-powered GM cars. On his way to an event earlier this year in which General Motors announced that Tonawanda had been selected as the site that would build the 2020 Corvette's new LT2 V-8, Reuss decided that that old-school badge just had to be on every LT2 that left the factory.
As the story goes, he announced this on-the-spot decision to his staff, who then worked to create a mock-up of the design to show to the gathered media about an hour later. GM design was more or less informed, not asked, that the badge was going to live in the Corvette's obsessively stage-managed engine bay (both the engine and design teams were looped into the hurried preview session before the media were shown a sample)."
I mentioned earlier that the badge was added to a slide deck, specifically the powertrain section of the "2020 Chevrolet Corvette Media Event" where they introduced the LT2 engine and its technological advances made over the LT1.
