Once we were happy with the fit, we prepped our hook in the media blast cabinet to remove any rust or scale while giving it a nice, even texture. (Hopefully we’d never need to test the latter.) That should be plenty to drag our C5 into a trailer, or out of a gravel trap. We’d attach our hook to our bumper using a couple of grade 10.9 10mm bolts, each having a shear strength enough to resist nearly 12,000 pounds of force. We then finished it off with some hand filing.įrom there, it was a quick test fit followed by drilling some mounting holes in the bumper.
We left the sides a bit extended to increase strength, and made the hole by connecting two hole-sawed openings with a cutoff wheel. We marked up our workpiece–mostly by holding it in place and referencing clearances right from the car–then got to work with the cutoff wheel removing everything that didn’t look like a tow hook.Īfter we had the piece roughly cut to shape, we smoothed out things with a hand grinder and bench sander. We would use the “top” surface to mount the hook to the bumper, then use the bottom surface to create the hook itself, using the side of the tubing to provide the offset necessary to clear the bumper cover. We would need to bring the mount in a downward direction from the bottom of that beam–a straight line forward from the beam would pass through the bumper cover itself–so we needed to fab up something with some offset.īending steel of the proper thickness to support the force of pulling the car wasn’t really within our abilities, but we found a nice piece of box-section rectangular tubing in our scrap pile, and it would provide the necessary offset to clear the cover.
The C5 has a large bumper beam easily accessible right behind those openings, so that made for the easiest mounting location. That, combined with the fact that the tow hook itself was a little, shall we say, rough, gave us a good excuse to build a new, more appropriate tow hook. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked fine, and also allowed us to lock up the Corvette when we rode it to school.īeing flexible, however, and affixed back near the headlight mechanism, the cable did deflect quite a bit depending on the angle the car was being winched from.Īs a result, cutting a hole in the Trackspec covers large enough to account for all this potential deflection would result in a fairly large opening. Our tow hook had been hastily assembled from an old cable bike lock the night before an event. Our only complication came on the passenger side, where we had our tow hook extending through the front bumper. Simply line up the panels over the gaps and lights, and affix them with your chosen fastener. Installing the panels is easy–they come with rivets, but we used screws so they’d be more easily removable should we need to take them off at any point. We previously used some Trackspec vents on our Mustang project, so we were familiar with the fit, finish and quality of its bits. Trackspec is at the forefront of the NASA Spec Corvette series, building all the parts necessary to turn a C5 into a competitive ride. These covers considerably clean up both the appearance and the aerodynamics of the front of the C5, as well as blocking off that pressure trap inside the bumper. Rather than leave the cardboard in place–sure, it looks fine, but we’d have to replace it after every rain shower–we went with a bolt-on solution from Trackspec Motorsports in the form of some pre-bent, powdercoated covers that cleanly fill these gaps and cover the fog lights as well. Blocking off these openings with some cardboard showed that the high-pressure bubble was eliminated. When we did some basic testing with a magnehelic gauge–look for a deeper dive in the June 2022 issue of GRM–we found high-pressure air collecting inside the bumper that had no real place to escape except downward, thus creating lift.
As a result, that large area behind the bumper didn’t actually serve any purpose. Some aftermarket induction systems draw intake air from within the bumper, but in our case our Breathless Racing intake drew air from the same airstream that fed the radiator and oil cooler. Now, for some C5 owners, these holes don’t actually lead nowhere. So, those two big holes to nowhere in the front bumper of a C5 Corvette? Time to deal with them.
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