What makes the C4 ZR1 Corvette special?
Video Transcript [Music] hello everybody welcome back to c&s corvettes and this is Lyle this is my weekly podcast and today i want to talk to you about a very special car that a lot of people forgot about for a long time but it is making a big comeback in value and desirability I'm going to talk to you about the reasons why and I'm going to talk to you about the things you need to be careful of if you're looking at one of those cars wait a minute I'm getting ahead of myself before we get rolling with the zr1 video please take the time to like and subscribe downstairs here because that's the thing that really allows me to keep making more and more content and allows me to take time out of my regular business day to bring you guys more important information i really much appreciate it thank you in advance now let's get back to the video the car i'm talking about of course is the 1990 to the 1995 corvette zr1 now the zr1 as many of you know was a very special car for the time it was very advanced for the time especially that lt5 engine the engine was designed by lotus in conjunction with Chevrolet built by mercury marine and it sported four cams 32 valves and at the first couple of years it had 375 horses now in today's day and age we look at that and go well that's not a lot back in 1990 375 horses was a lot of horses um in fact they had to for what they were trying to do with the handling capabilities of this car and for the power that it was making the car has corvette zr1 specific body panels specifically the doors the rocker panels the rear fascia and the rear deck are all corvette zr1 only it's considerably wider than a stock corvette and in 1990 was the only corvette that had the more squarish tail lights as opposed to the purely round taillights that we'd seen from 84 up through 90. uh the car made 375 horses it made it at 5700 rpms which means that around town the zr1 drove pretty much like a regular l98 car it didn't in fact it had less low end grunt than the l98 did but when you got up into the rpm range that engine would scream and that's why it had a top speed of 179 miles an hour which in 1990 91 92 was basically unheard of uh give you an example the 1992 lt1 had a top speed of 161 so considerably faster car and under that custom body work set two 11 inch wide rear wheels shot with 315 35 zr17 tires the largest to be used on an American production car up until that point so we started in 1990 and then moved into 1991. horsepower didn't change what did change unfortunately was that they made the 1991 corvette with the rear fascia and the square tail lights look just like the zr1 so unless you really knew what you were looking for it'd be hard to tell the two apart and considering that the zr1 option basically doubled the price of the car there were some people who were kind of upset about that because parking the two cars next to each other you can see a difference but if they were 100 feet apart and they were the same color kind of hard to tell unless you really knew what you were looking for that said gm did manage to sell twenty 6922 of these cars between 1990 and 1995. in 1993 there was a special ruby red 40th anniversary edition and horsepower went up to 405 which we wouldn't see in corvette again until the 2002 z06 1994 the zr1 got the five spoke iconic five spoke wheels that they then used similar wheels on the grand sport and the 96 collector edition but these were by far the most aggressive wheels we'd seen on a corvette in a long time some of the special features on the zr1 included what they called the valet switch there was actually a key lock cylinder in the center gauge bezel that you would have full power or valet so if you were handing off the car to a ballet or to somebody who might not be used to having that much power you could actually turn down the power using that key so that the car wouldn't get away from the uninitiated the lt5 motor was very very smooth it was very much a European style supercar motor things like having the starter directly under the plenum rather than at the bottom right of the block like every other Chevy small block ever made helped center the weight it was very nice until you had to replace the starter because you actually had to pull the top of the engine off the plenum to get to the starter kind of a pain in the butt but again we went with a gm with a European style design similar to like a v8 in a bmw that would see 10 years later the zr1 drives very very well however if you break that engine you are in deep deep trouble because famously the parts for the lt5 engine and the tooling to make more parts for the l25 engine were destroyed very early on they no longer exist now you can still find a few places that have some of the old brand new crate motors still sitting in the crates they're just waiting for somebody to need it but you're gonna pay as much for that motor as you would for the car so the good news is most things on the car are just regular c4 the suspension's the same most of the 99 of the interior is the same all of that stuff headlights that's all regular c4 so if you need to refresh and improve a zr1 most of that stuff is readily available in the aftermarket and isn't priced supercar parts high i think the biggest problem i see for the future of that car is it doesn't make a ton of horsepower by today's standards now granted in 1990 1-2-3 it was a ton of horsepower we hadn't seen 400 horsepower in American car in a long long time until the viper came along in 92 there was nothing that was even close to it so it does have a special place in history it is a very unique engine and if you take care of it they've proven to be very very reliable in fact engine failures short of track work or really really pushing it are quite rare considering how exotic that design was for the time values that I've seen wow let me tell you about seven years ago we had a 1992 zr1 for sale with 32 000 miles on it competition yellow black interior gorgeous car gorgeous i sold that car for sixteen thousand five hundred dollars and i was really happy to get it because at the time nobody wanted a zr1 that's changing i just looked at zr1 values today on a couple of different websites and the cheapest one i could find had 86 000 miles on it was 22 grand and the low mileage stuff is bringing 40 to 45 000 i can't believe that but looking at the market in the aggregate i can see how values have really soared on everything and there's never going to be a car that's quite as quirky or special in the Chevy lineup as that zr1 was if you want a zr1 my suggestion like i do with every corvette is make sure you find somebody who knows what they're looking at to give it a full inspection before you invest just to make sure you're getting a clean undamaged unmessed width example beyond that if you can have one you should because it's an icon there weren't very many of them made and they are actually pretty fun to drive and if not just the rear three quarter view is really really awesome too i hope you enjoyed this presentation if you own a zr1 or if you're looking for a zr1 or you have questions about a zr1 don't hesitate to email me at Lyle@corvettepartscenter.com I look forward to talking to you again soon have a great weekend