2014 Chevy Camaro Z/28 is So Fast that its Wheels Can Spin Inside its Tires, but Chevy Found a Fix (Video)

March 13, 2014

With 505 horsepower under the hood, Chevy’s engineers had to give the 2014 Camaro Z/28 tires and brakes that can keep all that power under control. Unfortunately during initial tests, Chevy’s engineers noticed that the tires were providing so much traction and the brakes so much stopping force that the wheels rotated inside the tire.

“We were told to build a fast car – period,” said Mark Stielow, Camaro Z/28 program manager and pro-touring expert. “We knew on Day One we’d need to bring some of the best suppliers onboard to make it happen.”

Fitted with its Pirelli P Zero Trofeo R tires and Brembo carbon-ceramic brake rotors, the Z/28 is able to achieve up to 1.5 g in deceleration force. During further testing the engineers noticed that the Z/28’s wheels were slipping in the tires. They sought the root of the problem by marking one of the tires at the beginning of a lap with a chalk line relative to the valve stem on the wheel. At the end of the lap, they recorded where the chalk line ended up and noticed the tire had rotated at least a full 360 degrees from where they started.

Chevy tried the method that racers use, through the placement of an abrasive paint around the bead of the wheel, where the tire meets the rim, to combat the problem on race cars. The Z/28’s engineers tried it, but it wasn’t strong enough to prevent the slippage. Finally, they tried media blasting, which involves shooting a gritty material through an air gun at the wheel’s surface, adding texture to the paint for the tire to grip.

“Media-blasting the wheel created an extremely aggressive grit on the rim, which finally got the tire to hold,” said Stielow.