Corvette Racing · 2020–now

Corvette C8.R

For sixty-seven years the Corvette raced with its engine in the front. In 2020 that finally changed — on the road and on the track at the same time. The C8.R is the first mid-engine race Corvette, and it announced itself the way the program likes to: by winning a championship in its first season.

The mid-engine Corvette C8.R race car
The C8.R — the first Corvette to go racing with its engine behind the driver, matching the road-going mid-engine C8. Photo: Arturo Hurtado (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

Moving the engine amidships wasn't a racing gimmick — it was the road car catching up to an idea Zora Arkus-Duntov had chased since the 1960s, and the race team followed the production C8 straight into the new layout. The C8.R debuted in IMSA's GTLM class in 2020 and promptly won the GTLM manufacturers' and drivers' championships in that very first season, with Antonio Garcia and Jordan Taylor. It backed it up with class wins at the marquee endurance races.

Going global: the Z06 GT3.R

When the GTLM class wound down, Corvette Racing moved to the GTD Pro category — and then made its biggest strategic shift yet. Rather than build a bespoke factory-only car, Chevrolet developed the Z06 GT3.R to the worldwide GT3 rulebook and started selling it to customer teams. For the first time, privateers and pro squads around the world could buy a current, factory-engineered race Corvette and campaign it on their own — a return, in a way, to the privateer spirit that carried the Corvette through its earliest racing decades, now with the full weight of the factory behind it.

The record so far

  • First mid-engine race Corvette — matching the road car's new layout
  • IMSA GTLM manufacturers' and drivers' titles in its debut 2020 season
  • Moved to GTD Pro, then to the customer Z06 GT3.R for global GT3 racing
  • Core drivers: Antonio Garcia, Jordan Taylor, Nicky Catsburg, Tommy Milner

Sixty-plus years after a rear-engine Corvette prototype crashed into a wall and a mid-engine dream kept getting killed in boardrooms, the fastest, most successful racing Corvettes finally carry their engines where the engineers always argued they belonged. See how that dream started in the rare Corvettes, and where it ran aground in the XP-819.