loading a low Corvette on a steel deck trailer without scraping, ramp angle and breakover

this is literally my username so i had better have an answer. you nailed the diagnosis already, it is the break where the ramp meets the dovetail, that is the breakover and it is a separate thing from how steep the ramps are. a long shallow ramp still has a sharp kink at the top if the dovetail drops away at a steeper angle than the ramp, and the belly of a low car hangs up right there.

what i do with lowered cars, in order of how much trouble it is:

• two 2x12 boards, four feet long, laid so each tire rolls up the board and onto the dovetail. that raises the car's path a board thickness exactly where the kink is and it is usually enough on its own. five dollars of lumber lives in my trailer.
• if that is not enough, aluminum ramp extensions or a set of race ramps staged in front of the trailer ramps so the climb starts earlier and shallower.
• approach at a slight angle, one tire at a time, so you are never breaking over on both sides of the splitter at once.
• let a little air out is a Corvette trick but on a Z06 with lowering bolts i would do the wood first.

a long walk-up winch is your friend here too, because you want the car creeping, not running at it with momentum and smacking the kink.

everything the Corvette guy said. one thing i will add because it is the mistake i see most. people try to fix a breakover problem by making the ramps longer, and longer ramps help the climb but do nothing about the kink at the top. the two fixes are for two different bumps. the ramp angle is the first bump, the breakover at the dovetail is the second, and the wood under the tires at the dovetail is specifically for the second one.

the other thing is winch versus drive it on. do not let your neighbor drive a lowered Z06 up a dovetail under its own power, because the second the splitter catches he panics and either jumps off the gas and rolls back or gives it more and cracks the splitter. a winch and a guy walking alongside watching the clearance is how you load a car you cannot afford to hurt. slow and boring is the whole trick.

if the trailer has a steel deck, throw a scrap of carpet or a moving blanket over the kink too, so if he does kiss it, it is a scuff on the blanket and not on his paint.

my enclosed trailer has a flat floor with a beavertail and no flip ramps, just the two ramp doors, and low cars are easy in it for exactly the reason being described here, there is no kink. so if your neighbor is going to keep this car and keep hauling it, the real answer might be that a dovetail with flip ramps is the wrong trailer for a Z06 and a flat-floor trailer or a trailer with a longer, lower-angle beavertail is the right one.

for the one haul he has now, do the wood. for the next ten years of owning a lowered car, the trailer design matters more than any trick, and he should know that before he buys his own trailer and repeats this every weekend.

loading low cars onto standard trailers is half of what i do and the wood-under-the-tires trick is the universal answer, but let me give you the number that makes people take it seriously. a C7 on lowering bolts has maybe three and a half inches of clearance under the splitter. a flip ramp meeting a dovetail can easily put a two inch bump in the car's path right at the transition. you do the math and you understand why it grinds.

when i am buying a trailer i look up the breakover and the loaded ramp angle on the maker's spec page before anything else, because that number is the difference between a trailer i can load anything on and one that fights me. the big makers publish it. a spec sheet off bigtextrailers.com or any of the real manufacturers will list ramp length and deck height, and from those two you can work out whether a low car is going to clear before you ever buy it.

tell your neighbor to stop being proud and carry the boards. i have been doing this twenty years and i still throw two 2x12s on every low car. nobody at the shop thinks less of you for it, they think less of you for a cracked splitter.

this is a good one to have on the board because the breakover-versus-ramp-angle thing trips up everybody once. two bumps, two fixes, and the boards are for the one at the dovetail.

i will add the hauler's version of the same lesson. i load cars that do not run all the time on a repo recovery, and a dead low car with no power steering and soft tires is harder than a Z06, so a come-along or a winch and a pair of boards is standard kit on my deckover. if you find yourself loading low cars more than once or twice a year, spend the money on a trailer with a long low beavertail and you will never think about any of this again.