2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Yearlong Review: Listen Up—Simple Pleasures in a Supercar

Vroom, VROOM—BrrraaAAAAA [upshift] AAaaa-WAAAAA [downshift] aaAAaahh [slowing, idling] Brmdmdmdmdmdm...

Don't worry, we're all right. What you're seeing are the sounds I make in tunnels when I'm in a quick electric car. EVs represent the future of automotive progress, but so far they fall short in aural drama. Before you know it, an entire generation of drivers may grow up not knowing the pleasure of hearing the bark of a finely tuned internal combustion engine reverberate against the walls of a parking garage or tunnel.

You don't need a fancy car to appreciate this moment in automotive time, but it helps if you have a 2023 Chevrolet Corvette Z06.

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Just Listen

After the new Corvette Z06 earned the Performance Vehicle of the Year title for 2023,MotorTrendborrowed a Z06 for a while. What a car. Like so many good Corvette variants over the years, the Z06 performs at a level far above its price point. It's 670-hp 5.5-liter flat-plane-crank V-8 has a lot to do with that.

But where exactly can you exploit that kind of engineering excellence?

When you can't get to the track, public roads can seem inadequate for a car whose capabilities are this high. It's like the sad horsepower gauge in the Bugatti Veyron; you love knowing the car has more than 1,000 hp, yet you feel bad about how little you use it. This is where the joy of simple automotive pleasures comes into play.

Driving a Z06 through a tunnel thrills in a way electric cars can't—yet. Even just listening to the revs climb to the V-8's 8,500-rpm redline from the side of the road is a pleasure, which is why we were fascinated to learn a little more about the story behind the 2023 Z06's sound.

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How We Got Here

The timing wasn't great. Pat Hoover, a senior design engineer on exhaust systems for Corvette, tells us that the way things worked out, General Motors decided the Z06 needed a different sound right before the COVID pandemic hit.

"We were told to go completely re-engineer and design the exhaust system before production during some of the most challenging times in the world," Hoover says.

Hoover, who has worked on four generations of Corvettes and two Camaros, got his team back to work. If you're car-spotting Corvettes, you'll know the Z06 from behind not just because of that fantastic sound but also from the center exhaust positioning; standard 'Vettes have pipes on the left and right side of the rear bumper.

"What we found very late in development is that for a flat-plane-crank engine, you really needed to pull the high-flow valve exhaust pipes as close as possible together."

Whatwefound by reading Frank Markus' exhaustive coverage of the 2023 Z06 is that the signature sound of a flat-plane-crank exhaust system is like two four-cylinder engines. Hmm. When you're prepping a car powered by the world's most powerful naturally aspirated production V-8, that won't do. So the team made a number of changes.

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Golden Ears and Guitars

In a time when things sometimes feel a bit too clinical and mapped out, it's refreshing to hear a subjective element is part of what Hoover, his associate Jeremy Salewsky, and their team do. Of course, you can't earnMotorTrend's 2023 Performance Vehicle of the Year title without impressive engineering, but Hoover tells us that yes, a few people within GM have "golden ears" and are trusted to discern the best-sounding prototype at the track. For him, he says playing guitar helps his work.

"When I play a really crappy-sounding guitar, man, I hear it," he says. "I know it. I feel it."

So although analyzing objective data is central to the process, there's a subjective, "I know it when I hear it" factor, too.

All we know is that it works. From the inescapably loud bark of the engine at startup to the sound of that powerful naturally aspirated V-8 in a tunnel, the Z06 doesn't forget that supercars should exhilarate even at sane speeds.

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