The Corvette C8.R will keep you awake at Le Mans next year

You wait years for a mid-engined Corvette, then three come along (almost) all at once. Following the Stingray coupe and convertible comes perhaps the most relevant to a lot of us, the C8.R racecar.

It’s most relevant because while official European sales of the roadgoing Stingrays are yet to be confirmed, the C8.R will definitely be thundering around the world’s endurance races making its famously guttural racket. This’ll be the car keeping you awake in the wee small hours of Le Mans, in other words.

“The C8.R and Corvette Stingray represent a true technology transfer, taking lessons from the street straight to the track and vice versa,” says Chevrolet. Thus the C8.R is newly mid-engined just like the showroom C8, a first in racing ‘Vettes.

Traditionalists will be appeased by the grey and yellow colour scheme of this first car, though, with subsequent C8.Rs to wear the bright yellow the C7 so often brightened up the podium with. This car will first take to the track in anger in January 2020 at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, with its Le Mans 24 Hour debut next June.

Specs are conspicuous by their absence – as is so often the way with racecars and their complex (some might say 'boring') regulations. But expect the nat-asp 6.2-litre V8 of the C8 road car to be pumping out as much power and noise as those pesky Balance of Performance rules will allow come summer 2020. We can smell the booze and barbeques just thinking about it.