The C8 Corvette is the biggest shift in Corvette design since the C4 appeared in 1984, one year late and radically different from the long-in-the-tooth C3 design that had made the transition from muscle car behemoth to disco scene superstar. We all know why…it’s the transition from front-engine, rear-drive to a mid-engine, rear drive layout, something that had been teased by General Motors for decades and was becoming the butt of jokes. Nobody knew what was coming first, the mid-engined Corvette or the “Chinese Democracy” album from Guns N’ Roses or a Corvette with it’s engine at the back. Purists shrieked that the Corvette finally lost it’s way, that they were now chasing Ferrari and were destined to fail because the Corvette name was too good ol’ boy, too American to matter. Others couldn’t wait for the Corvette to meet the exotics heads-up in their own world and at a price point that nobody could possibly touch without extreme decontentment, something that the upturned-noses could never accept.
I’ll be honest: I loved the idea of the front-engined Corvette giving headaches to the posh types. The rest of them had all accepted mid-rear layouts as the way to enlightenment, but here was the Corvette, looking like a shaved-down musclecar by comparison, ready and able to whizz in everybody’s Corn Flakes. The C8 will take some getting used to, but I don’t dislike it. I just don’t have much to say on it until I get the chance to get behind the wheel of one. But for a question that many have probably wondered, TheSketchMonkey has an answer: what if the C8 Corvette stuck to the front-engine layout? How would that look?
This is what happens when society gets to a point to where you go into a coffee shop, and the coffee menu is two pages long. For years, maybe decades, people have been clamoring for a mid engined Corvette. They finally build one, and someone is out there thinking about how they can make it front engined. Unbelieveable.