The Daytona 24 Hours later this month will herald the global competition debut for the latest GM sportscar to follow in the long line of successful Corvette Racing machines dating back to the C5-R from the last millennium.
Following the demise of the GTE rules, the Corvette C8.R that debuted in 2020 will be replaced in this year’s World Endurance Championship and IMSA SportsCar Championship – among other international series – by a new GT3 model that’s been in development for over two years.
The product of a collaboration between Pratt Miller Engineering and GM’s Competition Motorsports Engineering division, the Z06 GT3.R was conceived in the virtual world in 2021 through driver-in-the-loop testing before first making it onto a track in September 2022.
“Our relationship between the constructor and GM is primarily on the powertrain side,” says Pratt Miller motorsports technical director Ben Johnson. “But with a greater user base of the car and worldwide adoption of the car by multiple teams, we wanted to make sure to take advantage of that relationship as much as possible to take any learnings that they had from NASCAR, IndyCar, prototype racing and our long history at Corvette.”
Different ethos
Due to be operated by Pratt Miller’s factory-supported team and customers alike, it takes lessons learned on the C8.R that was converted to race against purpose-built GT3 cars in IMSA’s GTD Pro class after GTLM was dropped for 2022. But the Z06 is a fundamentally different car to the C8.R and incorporates a significant number of shared components from the production model – thought to be the most of any previous Corvette racer – to reflect its need to be priced competitively on the customer car market.
“There’s market targets for it that GM wanted to obtain and we worked very hard to get to that while still being able to be as performant as the car needed to be in all the different places it’s going to race,” says Johnson. Indeed, where the “most of the parts were re-designed” on the racing C8.R due to the framing of GTE regulations, Johnson notes that is not the case for GT3.
Where the C8.R was devised to be fielded solely by Pratt Miller, the second mid-engined Corvette has been designed with customers in mind to be much more user-friendly. Compromises on serviceability - and stability - made on the C8.R to chase outright performance have been re-examined in the knowledge there would not always be a team of 10 professional racing mechanics to work on the Z06 GT3.R, or be raced by factory-level pros.
Source: Autosport