Corvette Z06 Motor Goes Boom at Just 621 Miles

Why the motor of this Corvette Z06 popped is unclear — but the General’s response has been nothing but fantastic.

With 670 horsepower on tap, the 5.5-liter LT6 in the current Corvette Z06 is the most powerful naturally aspirated V8 ever put into a production car. And it might even be underrated. But putting the specs aside, its flat-plane design also means this version of the “Big Nasty” wails like a banshee, all the way up to a sky-high 8,600 rpm. In this latest clip from Marco and Jay of the steelankles YouTube channel, we get to see — and hear! — Marco do a few sweet pulls in his new Z06, until some scary clunking puts an end to the fun.

On the day the clip was filmed, the motor only had 621 miles on it, or 121 over the initial 500-mile break-in period. With so few miles on the clock, it’s reasonable to suspect that a defective bearing or the like might be to blame for the failure. Because in this day and age, even beating on a brand-new mill — while not advisable — probably isn’t going lead to catastrophic failure. For what it’s worth, Marco does say he followed the General’s break-in procedure, and was stoked to start laying down laps at VIR.

In the initial scan of the engine, the ECU indicated misfires on pots 1,2, 7, and 8, though as far as diagnostics go, that’s as much as we know. Because after the Corvette was towed to the local dealer, the General instructed the techs not to do any exploration. At the moment, that motor is being analyzed in Detroit, so the public might never know exactly what went wrong. Fortunately, a replacement engine went out immediately, and two weeks to the day after the failure, Marco was back on the road. How awesome is that?

Customer deliveries for the Z06 started late last year, and at this point, we know of two confirmed failures. Coincidentally, the other engine grenade also occurred in a model owned by a dude named Marco, and GM did right by him too. In this video, Marco says the local tech he talked to at the dealership said he’d heard of another, but a Google search didn’t confirm anything. Right now, the engine failures don’t seem as widespread as the overheating issues which plagued the C7 generation, so let’s hope these are isolated cases. Because the more we get to hear the glorious sound of the new LT6, the better!

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