[VIDEO] Did You See the Easter Egg in the Latest C8 Corvette ZR1 Trailer?

Jun 4, 2024

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[VIDEO] Did You See the Easter Egg in the Latest C8 Corvette ZR1 Trailer?

Chevrolet dropped a new video teaser for the C8 Corvette ZR1 on Monday and since then the debate among Corvette enthusiasts is focusing on the sound of the engine featured in the video.

Will the LT7 simply be the Z06’s LT7 with twin turbos? Or did engineers switch from the flat-plane crank to the cross-plane crank to lower vibrations? There’s a lot of opinions out there, but perhaps we are overthinking this.

Credit to our friend Mike of the Brink of Speed channel for sharing this video yesterday in which he breaks down the teaser. He noted that in the description of Chevy’s teaser video on YouTube, it says, “If you blink, you just might miss it. The Corvette ZR1 reveal is coming this summer.” (Emphasis Mine)

We certainly must have blinked, because the answer to the ZR1’s engine question might be staring us right in the face. At exactly 10 seconds into the teaser video where there is a bunch of smoke and just after the ZR1 is shown driving away from the viewer, look closely as you can see the outline of the LT6 rocket Easter egg right in the middle with a smokey circular “turbo” outline on each side. In the video, the rocket appears to be blasting off:

Now that you see the Easter Egg, watch it again here:

Sometimes we have a habit to overthink everything in terms of the engineering and what Chevrolet may be up to. But if we keep it simple, the rocket is clearly a reference to the LT6, and the “Unthinkable” is that Chevy is turbocharging the Corvette’s engine for the first time in its 71-year history.

The LT6 was referred to as the Gemini project while it was in development, and Jordan Lee’s small block engineers were successful in creating the largest naturally aspirated V8 engine with the flat-plane crank. To celebrate their achievement, the LT6 was adorned with a number of these rockets that are located all over the engine. If the ZR1s engine doesn’t have the flat-plane crank, is it still worthy of having the Gemini rocket to represent it?

GM’s engineers overcame a lot of obstacles to get the Z06’s LT6 to production, and so we believe it’s quite likely they have also figured a way to keep the ZR1’s V8 to be high revving FPC, even with the addition of the twin turbochargers.

Here is Mike Brink with his breakdown of the ZR1 teaser. He mentions the theory about a roots-type supercharger as well, but for me the GOLD in the video is at 6:24 when he is discussing this Easter Egg: