Chevrolet Corvette Z06 review

I should explain now that the car I drove was turned up to 11, even by Z06 standards. Indeed, and perhaps confusingly it is actually a Z06 with the Z07 pack attached, so perhaps that makes it a Z07? I don’t know. What I do know is that the Z07 comes on Michelin’s most extreme tyre, the Cup 2R, as standard, with unique tunes for its suspension and steering, an aero kit delivering 330kg of downforce at 186mph and carbon ceramic brakes. The test car even came on carbon wheels, which save 5kg per corner but with which you parallel park at your considerable financial peril.

I wish it didn’t look such a mess. I remember looking at a standard Stingray in the street and seeing all these confused lines and shapes, and the Z06 looks even worse. The strange thing is that I think the essential shape could be really good, but this seems like an elegantly proportioned town house turned over to university accommodation at the end of fresher’s week.

The driving position is sound, but I simply don’t accept a steering wheel more square than that of a mid-1970s Allegro is doing anything for the car, especially when the top and bottom are crafted from slippery carbon fibre. What’s so wrong with circular and suede? But I quite like the thin black line of ventilation buttons – all 18 of them, presented line astern next to the gear selector – and the gauges on the screen are simple and clear, whichever one of the four driving modes you adopt. There’s even decent combined boot space front and rear, especially if you don’t need it to store the targa-like removable centre section of the roof.

There are various driving modes, a range of off the peg options, each dramatically different to the others, but I never found one that delivered precisely what I wanted, namely an axe-wielding maniac of a powertrain with a savage sound and violent gearshifts, coupled with suspension as smooth and unflappable as Noel Coward playing Baccarat at the Hotel de Paris.

Happily, however, the car also does couture, via the ‘Z’ button on the steering wheel. Z for…Zora Arkus-Duntov, the man commonly held to be the father of the Corvette, even though he arrived at Chevrolet after Harley Earl’s original design was already in production. But he was the man who gave the car the reputation it enjoys today, so the homage is fair enough. Press the button and you can tune the steering and brake feel, the torque vectoring, suspension firmness, exhaust loudness and engine sharpness to precisely your own taste.

When you first drive the Z07-equipped Z06, two facts leap out at once, because both are surprising and, I’m glad to say, in a good way. First and even on a difficult Welsh mountain road, the ride is decent. Given the Z06 is stiffer than the standard car and the Z07 way stiffer than that, I’m guessing a base model Corvette rides like a Rolls-Royce on a frozen lake. Second, the engine is almost miraculously tractable given it’s producing over 120bhp for every litre of capacity, so you’re not always searching for exactly the right gear.

Sadly, however, a lot of the aural joy has been sacrificed to make this motor safe to 8600rpm. It sounds throatier than a Ferrari V8 and more tuneful than McLaren’s (not surprising given they’re both turbo motors) but that throbbing rumble – the sound of America no less – is gone.

Nor do I feel particularly at home in it. At low to medium efforts there’s too little feel through the steering to make the way it darts into the apex feel reassuring. But then you ask yourself whether this is how such a car is to be driven and conclude that if you’re just going to mooch about, you’d be far better rewarded with a stock Stingray whose larger 6.2-litre crossplane V8 still puts almost 500bhp under your foot. What you need to do in the Z06, at least this Z06, is dial up some really punchy settings, stop messing about and get on with it.

I’m not sure when I last felt a car’s character change so much at the press of a few buttons – perhaps when I first put a McLaren P1 into track mode and felt its body lower and spring rates triple – but a Z06 in maximum attack mode is a thing to behold. And with some weight in the steering and brakes but still some give in the suspension (because that’s what you’ve asked for – I tried track mode damping on the public road once because I felt I probably should, which was more than enough) it suddenly all started to make sense.

The powertrain in this mode? Absurdly, gloriously unhinged. You get the same level of aggression as found in a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, whose hallmarks are an absolutely manic soundtrack and instant gearshifts banged through with all the subtlety of a rifle butt jammed into one of your kidneys, but with even more power, enough to more than offset the 100-odd kilos of additional weight it carries. Meanwhile the front end doesn’t so much bite into the apex as sink its fangs into it. I’ve driven race cars with Rose jointed suspension that aren’t much more eager to change direction than this.

As with all such cars when driven on dry roads in public, the limit is dictated not by the adhesion of the tyres, which you’ll not be breaching if you have a sane cell between your ears, but common sense. But I have a sense, born from having done this for a while, that the Z07-enhanced Z06 might be the bequeather of one the wilder rides among road cars on race tracks.

At least I hope so. I really enjoyed getting to know the Z07 but I left it with two regrets. First, that I did not drive it on a circuit, second that I did not drive a standard Z06 on the road. I hope to have managed at least one of two before the year is out. If I do, I’ll let you know because if the car could just be matched to its surroundings a bit better, I expect there’s a sensational driving experience just waiting to be found.