"A slight lifter "tick tick" at idle erupts into big-block fury under hard acceleration, thanks to butterfly valves in two of the four exhaust tips that are there mostly for drive-by-noise regs, but, once open (from 3500-rpm up to the 7000-rpm redline), allow the engine to howl at full song.
You wont have heard anything like it since they stopped running production-car-based Trans-Am races in the 1970s. We bolted our own test equipment to a car at GM's Milford Proving Ground and found it had grunt enough to hurl this 3147-pound coupe to 60 mph in 3.5 seconds, and nail the standing quarter in 11.5 seconds at 127.1 mph. That 7000-rpm redline is almost superfluous, by the way, because the weapons-grade torque seam is so rich and flat that third gear is about all you need for most occasions. But it does mean the Z06 will hit 60 mph in first gear (albeit just past redline)."
"Nurburgring's few low-speed corners probed the balance and lateral limits of the chassis. While understeer is theoretically possible, you'd have to purposely cook a corner and yank the wheel to find it. More often, g-loads high enough to separate platelets from whole blood (we recorded a peak 1.18g) give way to a gentle drift followed by throttle-induced oversteer--not the fast way out of a bend, true, but a helluva lot of fun. It's east to give the give-and-take interplay between front and rear grip with the Z06's throttle because the car's balance is phenomenal--not necessarily due to its near 50/50 weight distribution, but the way the tires' grip is distributed and, once exceeded, released to gradually and predictably."
"It feels a lot like a race car made just street legal enough to get a license plate, a bit like a 21st-century Ferrari 250 GTO."
Originally posted by: Squisher
Originally posted by: CadetLee
I want to drive one.
I want to own one!