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According to HSV’s engineering boss, Joel Stoddart, the move to an LS9 presented plenty of challenges.
Not the least of which was actually finding the engines, since the LS9 is now out of production within GM. “We had to head to the US and start going through warehouses trying to find enough engines,” he says.
“And then we had to kind of beg for them. At the start, we could only find a handful, but we kept at it and eventually found enough to complete the program.” Sounds like you can forget about ordering an LS9 crate engine any time in the future. Even then, the challenges didn’t stop there.
“But an even bigger problem was finding a transmission to handle 800Nm. We knew the Tremec TR6060 from the Corvette could handle it, but that car has a transaxle, not a conventional layout. So we had to somehow put that gearset into our gearbox casing. Then we couldn’t find an input shaft anywhere in the GM world that was the right length, so we had our own made.”
Yet, HSV claims the car will still be profitable, and stresses that “it’s not a price gouge on our part. Not by any means.”
To read more on HSV’s 2017 range click here.
