Rob LoszewskiIt’s a well-known belief that you can’t really drive a Corvette in snow during the winter, or can you?
As some of you know, I live in New Hampshire. The Farmer’s Almanac predicted that this winter, would be very cold and icy for us, and it was spot on! Weeks-long arctic temperatures, snow, and A LOT of ice has been the norm up here in this part of the country.
As the owner of a 1990 ZR-1, the thought of driving my Corvette in the icy weather we’ve been having here, makes me cringe. As soon as the first snow fall is predicted, I take my Corvette off the road and it hibernates in my garage until the roads are finally clean of snow and salt in the spring.
For those of us living north of the snow-belt with Corvettes, this tends to be the norm.
However, some brave souls seem to have no problem driving their Corvettes through snow and ice.
Yesterday, I was sitting at a set of lights waiting to cross an intersection, when I saw a Torch Red, 1996 Corvette drive by me. I’ve seen this owner drive his C4 Corvette through every single season, and all kinds of weather for the last 13 years. No matter when I see his Corvette, it always looks clean and shiny. Kudos to him!
A few days ago, I was driving in downtown Manchester, NH, one day after getting slammed with a pretty bad ice storm, and a C6 Corvette coupe drove by me on roads that had a light glaze of ice all over them.
Fools, or brave souls? I’ll let you be the judge! However, these owners just might be on to something…
Just one more month, the 2019 Corvette ZR1 goes into production. With 755 hp, 715 lb-ft of torque and extremely large tires, the ZR1 is quite capable of setting the pavement on fire. However, this has not stopped GM’s Corvette Engineering team from driving them in the snow!
Chevrolet Corvette & Camaro Product Marketing Manager, Harlan Charles has been posting pictures on Facebook of the ZR1s he’s been driving through Michigan’s brutal winter this year.
Yesterday, Kirk Bennion, Exterior Design Manager for Corvette at GM, posted the photo below on his Facebook page of a ZR1 Corvette he’s currently driving:
So how is the Corvette Engineering team managing to handle these beasts in the snow? Take a look at the photo below of a 2019 Corvette ZR1 prototype doing some winter validation testing:
One of the options for the 2019 Corvette ZR1 is the ZTK option which includes P285/30ZR-19 front and P335/25ZR-20 rear Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 summer-only tires. Looking at the picture above, clearly, those are NOT summer-only tires!
They happen to be Michelin Alpin PA4 all-season tires which the Corvette Team has been using to conduct their winter testing. As of this writing, you won’t find them available on TireRack’s web site, but you can call TireRack and order them. The price? We don’t even want to imagine!!
