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The Corvette is an American icon, the only American car capable of competing with exotic, imported sports carts.
Nevertheless, GM should kill the Corvette.
The screams of legions of irate Corvette lovers can almost be heard in the background, but GM should ignore that and kill the Corvette anyway. One reason is that it uses antiquated technology developed to perfection--but still antiquated. An example is its pushrod engine,
With one exception, no other high-performance engine for at least 50 years has used a pushrod engine design. NASCAR, Trans Am or other rules-limited racing series engines don't count. The one exception is the Mercedes V-8 that gave Roger Penske his proverbial unfair advantage at the Indianapolis 500.
In the 1990s, in an effort to encourage the use of stock block engines to reduce costs at the Indy 500, USAC gave pushrod engines 48 cubic inches of increased displacement and 10 inches of increased turbocharger boost, acknowledging that DOHC engines had an inherent horsepower advantage.
Ilmore Engineering, with backing from Mercedes-Benz, saw an opportunity that USAC didn't anticipate: a purpose-built pushrod-engine that would provide a huge advantage. Al Unser Jr. won the 1994 Indianapolis 500 for Penske Racing with the engine, said to have an additional 200 horsepower compared to DOHC racing engines.
The catch is that even the Ilmore/Mercedes engine wasn't really a pushrod design. The pushrods were so short that it was effectively an OHC engine. That engine exploited a loophole in the rules. Ilmore knew that real pushrods aren't the way to build a high-performance engine.
Corvette engineers know that too, even if they are still perfecting a pushrod engine.
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