Corvette Z06: TG's Muscle Car of the Year

The first time it happens I squeak like a chipmunk ingesting helium. A minute and a bit later... and here we go again. Despite girding my loins for the inevitable, another unmanly noise escapes, a kind of "Pfffttttaaargheeuughh" that seems to find its way out of my ears, nose and mouth simultaneously. By lap three, I just feel ill.

Corvette C7.R endurance racer Tommy Milner is, like all pros, silky smooth while somehow persuading huge speed and retardation out of a car in places where insanity surely lurks. How? How is this possible?

Pictures: Mark Fagelson

This feature originally appeared in issue 264 of Top Gear magazine

Now, I have no problem with going fast, and have done so in all sorts of cars, in lots of different places, sometimes with famously quick drivers. But today we're at Road Atlanta, a track in the southern US state of Georgia that slams you in the face like a hardcore edit of the Nürburgring, then insults your mother. There's nowhere to catch your breath, and at least four corners where physics and the roiling topography of the landscape conspire to keep you very honest indeed.

Maybe as you try to straighten the kink at turn nine - at 145mph - you'll be able to refocus momentarily. Maybe. But then you're braking hard into the downhill chicane at 10 and 11, before heading back up to be almost immediately consumed by the pure evil of turn 12. This is a corner with a blind crest on entry and an exit that seems to change every time while managing to deposit your stomach down by your feet.

It would be a big enough ask in the most innocuous rental. Instead, we're in the new Corvette Z06, subjectively and objectively one of the fastest cars in the world. The day that TopGear lands in Atlanta, the Vette's PR machine issues its 0-62mph time: 2.95 seconds. This puts it into an extraordinarily elite band of high-performance brothers, and a category of one when you factor in the Z06's 650bhp, 650 torques and sub-£100k price. It's one of the many reasons it's made it into our Cars of the Year celebration.

But forget about all that stuff. Milner has just squeezed the brake pedal again, squishing all the air out of my lungs like a broken accordion. Even he makes a weird sound this time. The way the Z06 hauls itself down from a three-figure speed, from a point way past where you'd expect the last braking board to be, is almost impossible to compute. There are 400mm carbon-ceramic discs upfront, but this is a road car, and no road car I've ever experienced stops like this.

"No road car I've ever driven stops like this," Milner says. "This really does blur the line between a street car and a race car. You really can feel the downforce it generates. Pfffttttaaargheeuughh." In fact, later on we'll discover that we've been pulling 1.54g on the approach to turn 10. No wonder I've been drifting into the arena of the unwell.

This has been a good year for one of America's most famous brands. The Corvette Stingray acquitted itself remarkably well during Speed Week (see issue 258), despite the presence of techno heavyweights like the McLaren P1 and the cultured lairiness of the Jaguar F-Type. As you can read elsewhere in this issue, Clarkson has nominated the Vette Stingray as his personal COTY. It would be an understatement to say that JC has a habit of being contrary, but even in the year of the BMW i8, when hybrids finally got sexy, the Vette is a hell of a thing.

Well, the Z06 is another world. Seriously. Let's start with the hardware. In the slightly arcane world of GM power units, the new car uses the LT4 engine, a small-block 6.2-litre V8, related to the LT1 unit in the Stingray. But there have been some big changes. It's the first Z06 to use forced induction, in this instance an Eaton supercharger that fits in the engine's vee or "valley", as Corvette main man Tadge Juechter describes it. Even with the 'charger in place, the whole thing is sufficiently compact to comply with European ped pro regs. Which is one of the reasons we're getting it.

The aluminium cylinder heads are rotocast to improve their durability, the intake valves are made of titanium, there are forged aluminium pistons, machined connecting rods, stainless steel exhaust headers, and dry sump lubrication, for obvious reasons. The Z06 also uses the Stingray's variable valve management, and General Motor's clever cylinder deactivation technology. Juechter says the engine weighs an impressively light 240kg overall.

The Z06 challenges the dual-clutch transmission orthodoxy, but for good reasons. Firstly, it's available with a proper manual 'box, something that the European technocrats - Ferrari in particular - insist that only us crazy British still want. Oddly, it has flappy paddles, which trigger the Rev Match tech that simulates heel-and-toeing for anyone who's never mastered it. The jury stayed out on its efficacy around Castellolí, but apparently it's been tweaked for Z06 duty.

There's also a torque-converter auto, GM's amusingly old-fashioned sounding but rather trick Hydra-Matic 8L90, which can comfortably cope with the engine's forest-felling grunt. Mounted as a rear transaxle, whatever your preference, a carbon-fibre torque tube three times stiffer than the old car's aluminium item has the job of harnessing the power.

Juechter has the easygoing swagger you'd expect of a man who's been running the Corvette programme for more than two decades, and he acknowledges that, whether it's PDK, DCT or DSG, there are inevitable perception issues about shift speeds, and the engineering sophistication these systems imply. "But we've got our shift times pretty close to them," he adds, "and besides, we couldn't find anything that would fit, that was light enough, that could handle the torque or that allowed us to use the cylinder deactivation." Fine with us.

The chassis is the same hydroformed aluminium spaceframe as the Stingray's. It's 60 per cent stiffer than the old car's structure, so much so that even the convertible is 20 per cent more rigid than the old coupe. The suspension is the same as the Stingray's, but gets firmer anti-roll bars, bushes and selectable magnetic dampers. The bonnet is made of carbon fibre, and the floor is composite. The front track is 56mm wider; the rear, 80mm. And there are new vents and slats slashed all over the bodywork to funnel huge gobbets of air to the engine, brakes and transmission, while other aero addenda reduce lift while increasing downforce.

Aero is a huge deal on the Z06, which is pleasing given our current location and how much power we've got to play with. In fact, on top of the base car, there's a level two carbon-fibre aero package, which adds a front diffuser with end plates, and a rear wing. Even that doesn't supply the ultimate full stop: the level three package grafts on even bigger end plates, an adjustable transparent ‘wickerbill' on the edge of the rear spoiler and adds the Brembo carbon-ceramic brakes and Michelin's semi-slick ‘stickier-than-Sticky-the-stick-insect' Sport Cup 2 rubber. You've got to love a car that allows you to level up. So much so, in fact, that Chevy calls it the Z07.

Settle into the Vette, and the fighter-pilot associations swim reliably into view. There's an acre of bonnet ahead of you, seen through a narrow sliver of windscreen, and the front wings occupy separate zip codes. The driving position is low-slung, with the centre console pointedly angled towards the driver. And there's a head-up display, a conceit I've always hated and that no one has ever really sussed. Until now, that is. (The graphics are cool, and it avoids nasty reflections.) There's even a performance data recorder that usurps the obligatory track-day GoPro by using an integral camera and accelerometers to record lap times. What a narcissistic lot we've become.

Really, the ends of the column stalks should flip downto arm the missiles. We are locked and loaded.

But the Vette is more than just another car dreaming of a higher calling. It immediately feels like the real deal, although an occasionally rather baffling one. There's a drive mode selector button on the central tunnel that allows you to choose between Weather, Eco, Tour, Sport and Track, each of which monitors 12 different variables, including the magnetic ride, traction control, throttle input and the Z06/7's e-diff.

There's more. In Track mode, for example, the traction management has five different levels of torque reduction and braking intervention. Juechter and one of his test drivers reckon stage three is the best bet. We'll see.

It's pretty clear that the inner workings of this car are closer to avionics than anything earthbound. Its e-diff is a thing of wonder, right up there with the system on Ferrari's 458 Speciale. Yep, a Corvette that can cope with the world's finest-handling car. Road Atlanta's relentless up- and downhill esses never let up, but after a handful of laps, it's apparent that you can lean on the Z06 very, very hard indeed, sensing the torque juggling in infinitesimal fragments of time between the rear wheels. If you get clumsy or greedy, or maybe ride the kerbs too hard on the exit, you can sense that, too. The microprocessors in this thing are locked in mortal combat with physics, to the point where the weak link is quite obviously the wobbly human at the wheel.

Of the two transmissions, I prefer the manual, and the Rev Match turns out to be unexpectedly effective. So does the throttle pedal, which unleashes a wave of performance so visceral that now you're thinking Ferrari F12 Berlinetta. Jeez, this car is amazingly, terrifyingly, jowl-flappingly fast.

There's another Ferrari reference point: the 599 GTO. Like it, the Z06 does its best work with all the chassis electronics firmly switched on. Lose the electronic prophylactics, and you can almost feel the car saying: "Fool. MIT computer wizards have created algorithms that your tiny mind couldn't even dream of, but you think you're Johnny Big Bollocks. Alright, you asked for it, pal..."

Let me tell you, your cojones need to be bigger than merely big to keep the Z06 under control minus the avionics. It'll swap ends in a heartbeat, combust those amazing Michelins if you keep your foot in. Something other than 650 angry horses stops the Vette from being a natural drift king. It's a pity, but it's a much smarter idea to pop it back into stage three mode and revel in the vast expanse of its performance, instead.

Or, as we find out the next day as we head out into the wilds of Tennessee, leave it in seventh gear, stick the SiriusXM satellite radio on and just enjoy the ride. A coating of rain and some vengeful weather makes the first part of the journey an adventure on those cut slicks, but it quickly warms up. Turns out that the Z06 is utterly docile on the road, and will happily rumble along on half its eight cylinders, crank spinning lazily.

We fuel up at a remote country store, staffed by a couple of young guys who park their trail bikes inside. While I wait to use the john, I can't help noticing that, amid the detritus on a table, there's a medical textbook called Human Anatomy & Physiology. The Vette's crank spins a little more energetically as we leave. This is Deliverance country, and though there's undoubtedly a perfectly good explanation, I can't think of one right now.

We head for TG favourite ‘the tail of the dragon', otherwise known as Deals Gap, a snake-hipped road consisting of 11 miles and 318 corners beside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It's mainly bikers who come here - old, overweight bikers dreaming of Captain America and Billy the Kid - although the Honda S2000 seems to be the four-wheeled vehicle of choice. We meet one guy who reckons he's been here more than 2,000 times. It's very European, and a bit like the famous Hakone drift road near Tokyo. It's exactly the sort of challenge that would have demolished previous Vettes.

Unsurprisingly, the Z06 is brilliant. There are nasty camber changes, and one corner even comes on like the Yankee cousin of the Nordschleife's naughty Karussell. On steering feel and overall balance, the American has it covered.

In fact, it has it covered on most things. Go to the outer edge of your personal comfort zone, and the Z06 will meet you there. It'll trade blows with the best that AMG, BMW, Ferrari or Porsche has to offer, on the trickiest tracks in the world. It'll make you feel like a million dollars but costs a fraction of that. America has a new hero.