With the Dead To Shred Corvette buttoned up and no longer facing concerns of internal motor issues, it was time to give the car a proper shakedown. While a multitude of street driven trips confirmed the car was not dead, we need a real motorsports event to confirm the car was really alive!
Enter, Autocross with Bridge City Autosports. They had an event coming up for the weekend and the weather was looking to be warm and sunny. When the moon and the stars align, you don't sit that out, and so we registered the car and made plans to be there for the event.
Leading Up To The Event
Now it's worth mentioning again that this car is being built for auto-crossing in the SCCA Street Touring class, in which the C5 Corvette falls into the "B" category. The Street Touring class is where we feel the C5 Corvette really can shine without ruining the car. The Street Touring class allows for coilovers, modified sway bars, and larger wheels and tires. While larger brakes can be added, it's not necessary for most folks. The key differentiation for this class we want to mention though is it avoids the very expensive rabbit hole that is the CAM (Classic American Muscle) category, in which the moon is pretty much the limit. Street touring will let us make the car very capable and competitive without making it unbearable to drive a long distance and avoids breaking the bank.
For competing in SCCA BST, we have a few things going for the car already. Our C5 Corvette came with Silvers Coilovers, which while not our first choice, aren't exactly terrible either, and have demonstrated to be reliable for C5 Corvette owners in the "budget coil-over" category. We were also able to source some C6 Z06 sway bars from All American Classics, a wrecking yard that specializes in making LS motors available to classic car folks who often don't have a lot else to do with the remainder of the car parts. Speaking of, check out Shred Jesse's article on coil-over and sway bar sizing.
An area we would be lacking in for this event unfortunately would be tire. The C5 Corvette non Z06 models came with 245 width front tires, 275 width rear tires. This offset tends to bias the car towards understeer, which for todays course would not be preferred, but is safer for a road going car or novice driver. Fortunately for us though, we're working with Shred Jesse who has a 1999 Time Attack C5 and an extra set of 315 wide Continental ECF tires on 18x11 wheels. That combination will make the car grip like a cat not wanting to be yanked off a couch! See the above numbers as well for a comparison in just how much wider they are, while only being 1% smaller in diameter.
One additional mod we tackled while we were in there was making the OEM fender ducts functional. The C5 comes with fender ducts, but they are mostly aesthetic. Many folks open this region up and just let it free flow... but having proper ducting is essential. We utilized the C5 Fender Ducts from Millsy Motorsports. They were exceptionally easy to install, are particularly stout, and supporting them supports a Corvette enthusiast just like ourselves, so money well spent!
How The Event Itself Went
Arriving early we got in line for Tech. We weren't terribly concerned about the car passing, but we figured it would lend some credibility to what we're doing here if it did!
Sure enough the C5 Corvette passed tech with just a modest look-over. If you were ever worried about your car passing tech for autocross, there really isn't that much to it so don't be nervous.
We parked the car and couldn't help but notice we had a pretty good picture opportunity with the PIR logo in the background. We then went over to the course walk and drivers meeting. We then learned we were up first and working first and so getting that course walk in early really mattered! Other drivers would have the benefit of watching us all go and thus gain some additional familiarity with the course.
So how did the C5 Corvette handle? Well let's start with it gave us an ear to ear grin, and a younger dude who was hopping in various cars for ride alongs joined us and then declared at the end "Oh screw a miata I'm getting one of these!"
Still, the Corvette definitely understeered. This makes sense given the understeer biased spring rates combined with street tires and Silvers Coilovers, who tend to spring their cars in such a way that they are understeer biased. We feel pretty confident though with some big bad 315 square tires on this car it'll melt minds and put down blazingly fast times!
Now is a good time to focus though on the actual purpose of this event: to shake down the car with some real world driving. At that, we succeeded. It didn't overheat, it didn't blow up, it never made me think "oh boy we've got a problem" and it showed that it's ready for more. Now... did everything go perfect? No, this car was dead and things like the picture above occurred where the hatch buttons fell out mid run. The car isn't perfect for sure, but it's got the potential to grow!
What's Next For The Dead to Shred Corvette?
With a successful autocross under the cars belt it's now time to refine the chassis along with chase down some general quality of life bugs. We'll for sure be fitting the 315 width tires onto the car that we have, and in general refining the coil-over adjustability (which was crud) and dealing with everything that literally shook loose on the car. Autocross also massively benefits from a harness, so we'll be dropping in a harness setup. The transmission fluid is also likely older than time itself, and the differential fluid we'd bet smells like death. Time and budget allowing before the next big even we also expect to upgrade the brakes. While for autocross we've got more than enough brakes... bigger brakes are always better and the C5 Corvette would massively benefit from some improvements in this category!
