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Tadge Tells All, Part Two: How the C5 Z06 Came to Be, and Almost Didn’t

In part one of this three-part series on the past, present, and future of America’s sports car, we promised to tell you what happened to the $29,995 C5 Corvette. If you haven’t yet watched the first video, and heard from Tadge Juechter himself, we’ll bring you up to speed, tracing the line between that car and the C5 Z06. (Part three covers the C7 and transition to mid-engine.)
This is the second installment of our roundtable with Tadge Juechter, executive chief engineer of the Corvette from 2006 to 2024, and Harlan Charles, marketing manager for Corvette since 2001. The tell-all discussion is moderated by our own Larry Webster, editor-in-chief of Hagerty Media, and Jerry Burton, member of the Corvette Hall of Fame, Hagerty contributor, and founding editor of Corvette Quarterly magazine.
In the first part, we discovered how the Corvette narrowly escaped extinction during the 2008 financial crisis, which also delayed the arrival of the mid-engine Corvette, which at one point was scheduled to debut for the 2012 model year. (It arrived eight years later.) Juechter revealed how he, and others, fought for the Corvette’s existence even before then, during the transition from the car’s fourth to fifth generation, when leadership called for a Corvette that cost under $30,000.
Juechter knew that the arrival of a new Corvette would spur demand, and experience said to bring out the higher-optioned, higher-margin model first. (Modern EVs follow this sequence to a T.) “It would be dumb to bring out the super-cheap one first,” said Juechter, “so I brought out the coupe [in ’97] and then the convertible in quick succession [in ’98].” The plan was to bring out the value-focused Corvette in 1999, when “maybe the bloom was off the rose.”

Turns out, the first variants of the C5 sold so well that Chevy never needed a Corvette with cloth seats and crank windows. “We were just selling every one we could make,” said Juechter—2000 cars a month. Why introduce a cheaper car with a tighter profit margin? The team wasn’t sure the cheap Corvette was a good decision after all, so they went to the customers.
“We actually went to customers and said, ‘What do you guys think of this? Should we do this?'” said Juechter. “And they’re like, ‘Are you kidding me? You’re going to bring out a cheap version of my car after I already bought mine?’
“They said, ‘You need your head examined. I don’t want to see some kid who paid less than I did in some car that looks like mine.'” Dealers, too, urged the team not to do it.
Of course, Juechter and his team were never going to waste the development they had done on the cheap car. One of their main objectives with the C5 had been to make the car stiffer—in engineering speak, to increase global torsional stiffness, or how much the car twists, nose to tail. “If you go back and drive a C4, you’ll see what happens,” says Juechter. “You hit a bump on one side, you can actually watch the windshield pillars move laterally as the whole car twists.”

Modern Corvettes are famous for their removable roof panels. The structure that held those panels on the C5 was made of magnesium, a very strong but very expensive material. Naturally, the $30K Corvette wouldn’t have such exotic construction—it would simply have a fixed roof. “It was actually Dave Hill [Juechter’s predecessor] who thought of it,” says Juechter. “He said, let’s do a fixed roof car that fits in the space where the convertible tonneau is and takes the place of the roof. And it’s like, God, that’s genius. They drew that on a napkin.”
Hill’s hardtop made the C5 cheaper, stiffer, and lighter. But if the hardtop model wasn’t going to be a $29,995 Corvette, what would it be?

Juechter had an idea: “Let’s make it a performance-oriented car.” The team didn’t have time to do an engine, but they made a manual transmission standard, put it exclusively on the Z51 suspension, and “put all the lightweight stuff in it.” That was the Fixed-Roof Coupe, sold from 1999-2000. Then, they tweaked it further, developing the LS6 engine, revising the suspension, and building out a more thorough set of performance enhancements. That car got its name thanks to a longtime propulsion vehicle systems engineer who belonged to the National Corvette Restorers Society. His name was Bill Nichols, and he knew his history. Spiritually, Tadge’s light, stiff, powerful Corvette was most closely related to the Z06 moniker from the C2 era.
“It was almost like a casual thing, says Juechter, “‘Oh, how about Z06?’ We didn’t know what it was going to become. That it was going to become this global brand… But it was the perfect name.”
And thus what was to be the least-expensive Corvette in the C5 lineup evolved into the performance model.

It was also the generation of Corvette that took the model back to the race track.
“How do you get a global reputation for a sports car?” You race it, says Juechter. Endurance racing made the most sense, he continued, because the racers have the closest tie to the street cars. The program began rather small, run by the shop that built the race cars, Pratt & Miller, with funding from Chevrolet. The two companies kept each other at arm’s length at first, but over the years became closer and closer. (As of 2024, the race shop got its name in the program title: Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller Motorsports.) The C5.R laid the groundwork for a decades-long run of endurance racing success, and, along with the Z06, helped set the tone for subsequent Corvette generations.

It didn’t take long for Juechter and his team to take the Z06 even further, and you can tell he’s particularly fond of it. Juechter remembers the C6 Z06 for its 198-mph top speed, which he has experienced firsthand. “I did it with Bob Lutz on the circle track one time when we were not supposed to do it.
“It was fun.”
“The immediacy of having a seven-liter, naturally aspirated engine in such a light car and a manual transmission—I’m a manual transmission guy—and to spin to 7000 rpm … it just seemed crazy, crazy over the top.”

Watch the video to hear Tadge explain how everyone worked together to make that “over-the-top” car a reality—and stay tuned for the third and final part of the series, when the team aimed even higher.
To listen to the interview in full, check out the Never Stop Driving podcast:
The stories in and around the bankruptcy time were fascinating to hear how they were able to still move forward in those difficult transition times for the company. It would be interesting to have seen a mid-engined C7 had bankruptcy not occurred. The story on the front engined turbo mule burning is not too surprising.