Inside Look at a C8 Corvette Z06 Engine Replacement
C8 Corvette Z06 with less than 500 miles on it needed an engine replacement; here’s the process.
The C8 Corvette Z06 is a moonshot sportscar from GM. It has performance that rivals many expensive exotic cars. And the star of the C8 Z06 show is the LT6 flat-plane crank engine. It is the most powerful naturally aspirated V8 in the world. Last October I wrote an article that took a deeper dive into the C8 Z06. And in that article, I mentioned that GM is not very experienced in building engines like this. I questioned the long-term reliability. Well, the early results are not encouraging. There have been reports of engines going bad with less than 1,000 miles on them. And in this video, we have a Z06 with less than 500 miles on it that needs an engine replacement because it was making strange sounds and GM wanted it back. Not a good start.
But if you do need to replace the LT6 in a C8 Z06 an excellent video was recently posted on the Zack Porter YouTube channel. In this video Porter is able to replace the engine in less than 25 minutes. Well, not really, the video is just 25 minutes long but much of the actual work is edited out. Still, it provides an excellent overview of how the engine is removed. It also offers us a nice close-up view of the engine and its ancillaries. There are not many LT6 engine swap videos out there so this is a rare view. Hopefully the reliability of these engines improves and videos like this continue to be rare.
Getting Started
The engine replacement project begins by disconnecting the battery and getting the car in the air. Make sure your impact wrench is fully charged because there are a LOT of bolts to remove. All of the underbody covers need to be removed and they are held in with dozens of bolts. Then fluids are drained including the oil in the oil tank. Then of course the fuel lines need to be disconnected, the coolant hoses, the AC compressor needs to be moved out of the way and so on.
Engine Out
The rear bumper needs to be removed and part of the suspension needs to be disconnected. The video covers all the details so I am not going to repeat everything here. Suffice to say there is a significant amount of work to be done. But nothing appears overly complicated. Eventually Porter has the engine and transmission on the lift table and it is ready to be lowered out of the car. He lowers it slowly and checks constantly that nothing was missed that could prevent the engine from coming out clean. Once out, the exhaust, cats, and so on are removed from the old engine and swapped to the new one.
First Start
The new engine is fully dressed and then installed in the Z06 and fired up for the first time. It sounds healthy. On the test drive there are no warning lights or codes being thrown so it all seems good. Hopefully this engine lasts longer than the first one. It is great to get this look into these cars. But GM needs to get to the bottom of these failures.
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