This ongoing embarrassment, a follow up to the base Stingray fiasco brings up another point: how does Juechter compare to the person responsible for success of previous generations of Corvette, especially C5 and C6, Dave Hill?
To put it mildly, Juechter does not hold a candle to the retired Corvette chief engineer, in fact, accomplishments of Dave Hill make him look like a completely incompetent idiot. Juechter, an errand boy during Hill's times, learned absolutely nothing from Hill and unfortunately insisted on carving his own spot in Corvette history, a notion that ended up placing him firmly in the Corvette's biggest fuck ups category.
Dave Hill was a pretty sharp guy, he had a vision to give Corvette three most important elements to elevate it to a very capable high performance car: decent chassis, longer wheelbase and smaller overhang and rear mounted transmission. On top of it, Dave Hill fully understood constraints of a high performance track car versus road going high performance GT car and thus, two cars topped the Corvette line up during his tenure: Corvette Z06 and Corvette ZR1. These two cars performed exactly what they were intended to do, one owning all road courses and race tracks and the ZR1 literally owned the street. In fact, both of these cars set such high performance standards that this might have been the pinnacle of front engine and rear wheel drive Corvette ever.
And here comes Tadge Juechter, obviously ambition driven but with absolutely no intellect or even common sense, even if his life depended on them. This guy has not learned a single bit from Dave Hill nor did he get a good grasp on the proper car design. Dave Hill's team made a very wise decision setting up the Z06 as a large displacement normally aspirated light weight car, exactly how Zora Arkus-Duntov advocated many years before him. The car performed great, in fact, the car was very amazing on the track.
The later car, ZR1 was never advertised as a track car, all it had to do was to be a superfast street car, leaving track duties to the Z06. The hardware designed to fortify the ZR1 drivetrain was chosen very carefully, achieving a great compromise between performance and durability, including the supercharger and its associated hardware and most importantly, its cooling system.
By now, it is very obvious that Juechter either through his own ignorance and stupidity or arrogance, dealt away with the previous experience earned by Duntov and Hill. In fact, it appears that Juchter attempted to prove both Duntov and Hill wrong, trying his hardest to establish his own school of thought regarding Corvette design.
Well, the jig is up and there is no more greatness for Juechter. Had this moron understood why Hill picked the specific supercharger that he did, he could have easily spare himself the current humiliation. Too late now for Juechter and if he is not fired, it may be as well too late for Corvette. Ironically enough, Dave Hill was a very low key guy, with plenty of humility, unlike Juechter who as a matter of fact resembles another idiot, Ralph Gilles. Hopefully Juechter meets the same fate as Gilles because the time is very ripe to make a swooping change in Corvette team.
Although I feel that many of your posts about the C7 are brash and somewhat 'overboard'.... I completely agree with you here. Tadge acts as a walking billboard for Corvette..... and I HATE that. It is flat out embarrassing. GM has always let the Vette speak for itself with its performance. I can't look at a C7 without seeing his face. The 'cool' thing about Dave Hill is that your never heard of the guy... never. Unless you were a true Vette fanatic with an interest in the engineering of the car. Dave kept things simple but still pushed the performance/engineering envelope. Ask any mechanical engineer... employing simplicity (but near perfection) almost always comes out on top. The C7 should have been an evolution... not a revolution. Never a single day that I looked at the C5/6 and questioned it or didn't like it (overall) for what it was. Though I do like (sometimes love) the C7 on most days, some days I really question it. Side note, AFM should have NEVER found its way into a Corvette..... a 20k rpm lower profile supercharger? I think we all knew what the outcome would be with that.... it turned the LT1 into a heat sink... even with a better heat exchanger.
ReplyDeleteI'll leave sugarcoating to Juechter and GM marketing. When Juechter declared previous generation of Corvette obsolete, he did not just insult owners of these cars but most of all, he insulted Dave Hill, the guy who spent his time improving the car instead of promoting himself. I never considered buying a Corvette until Dave Hill's era and after going through four of them, no longer can see doing it again, not after what Juechter did.
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