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Man Maths: Chevrolet Corvette Z06

2 weeks ago

Writer:

Dan Prosser | Ti co-founder

Date:

22 November 2025

Six months earlier the fastest, most exotic thing I’d driven was a Porsche Boxster. Now here I was, still just a kid, at the wheel of a 500bhp Chevrolet Corvette Z06, with hundreds of absolutely plastered race fans blocking the road and demanding I execute a burnout. Which I’d never done before either.

How hard could it be? I figured it could only go wrong if I undercooked it, so I dialled up every revolution the 7-litre small block could muster, side-stepped the clutch, planted my left foot hard on the brake pedal, and hoped for the best. Several seconds later I lifted off, knocked it into neutral and sighed in relief as acrid tyre smoke seeped into the cabin. A pretty decent burnout given it was my first attempt. Nothing broken, nobody hurt and for fulfilling my end of the bargain, the crowd duly parted and allowed me safe passage.

The trouble with driving a banana yellow Corvette on the roads outside Circuit de la Sarthe on the Friday of Le Mans week – back in 2008, at least – was that the braying mob simply would not let you through without first offering some sort of sacrifice to the tyre gods. That car is the perfect target. I’m not sure if all this goes on today but it was rife back then. It was called Mad Friday and it was, or perhaps still is, just a bit of fun, but it was bloody terrifying to a young lad still only a few months into his first car journalism job.

In a Z06, it's better to burnout than to fade away

I suppose there’s a very slight chance I’d proven myself to be trustworthy in such circumstances by then. Rather more likely, I suspect, is that nobody at the little magazine publisher I worked at had heard of the phrase ‘duty of care’. Either way and reckless though it might have been, I took a Corvette Z06 on a European road trip aged 21 and it was absolutely epic.

I was so wary of that car. It felt vast (although today’s most basic Porsche 911 is wider) and the big V8 was a malevolent presence, just waiting for an opportunity to catch me out. At least that’s the way it felt to me at the time. Burnouts aside I was careful with it, perhaps understanding even then that if I brought the car home damaged or didn’t bring it home at all, there’d be no more trips like this one.

Finding a Corvette Z06 for sale in the UK could be tricky

For sheer drama, sense of occasion and massive adrenaline spikes, very little gets close to a go-faster Corvette. You can debate all you like the finer things like steering precision, traction, body control, bump compliance and all the rest of it, but cars like these are built to thrill and the ’Vette does that just as well as anything we build on this side of the Atlantic.

Problem is, there are so few sixth-generation C6 Corvette Z06s like the one I drove on our side of the water that almost nobody will ever get the chance to experience that thrill. I trawled the classifieds and found just one for sale, for £49,950. It’s a 2009 car with 15,000 miles on the clock. A Corvette isn’t exactly in its natural habitat on our narrow, bumpy back roads, but should the time ever come when I’ve grown tired of Europe’s downsized, turbocharged, electrified, ever more efficient and increasingly digital sports cars, I will know exactly where to look.

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