by Jack Barruth as republished from Road and Track

Has the track focus taken a back seat to outright speed?

Dateline October 2015:  This must be what it was like to be Saul “Slash” Hudson back in the early Nineties, I thought to myself. Over the four days of Performance Car of the Year testing I’d received dozens of social-media and text messages from various friends and/or acquaintances trying to find out what was happening. Had we crashed any cars? (Sorta.) Had anybody gotten arrested, maybe after a long police chase? (No.) Did I talk somebody into letting me borrow his straight-piped chopper, riding it at window-shattering full throttle through a small Kentucky town at 2 am while said dude off his shirt and rolled around in the grass outside my hotel, screaming improvised obscenities at the assistant manager? Well, nobody asked me that, but it did happen. I felt like I was one of the Sons of Anarchy, except I was wearing a linen sportcoat and a pair of Allen-Edmonds long-wing brogues, custom-made from shell cordovan.

The most frequent text I got however, from auto journalists and casual friends and my own relatives was this: Did the Z06 blow up yet? Did it overheat? Did anything happen to it? After the tenth message to that effect I started to view PCOTY as a Guns N’ Roses tour during the “Use Your Illusion” period, where sometimes eighty thousand people and all the event workers and all the security and the roadies and the whole band would be there waiting to get started… but Axl Rose would be face-down in a public restroom somewhere. It was bound to happen, right? At some point, the Z06 would just check out. It would overheat or someone would put it in a tire wall or maybe one of the massively complicated computers that control everything from the differential to the multifunction LCD dash would just check out. I was told again and again that it was bound to happen. Just a matter of time.

And yet it didn’t. Not really. The most dramatic thing that happened was this: During our first day of track testing at NCM, the Corvette displayed some engine oil and transmission temperatures that were definitely all the way into the red zone. Some of that is design, and some of that was just due to our decision to have eight drivers in a row take the car out for multiple-lap evaluation runs. You wouldn’t ask your own Z06 to endure that many track sessions in a row without a break, and in truth the only one of our eight cars that didn’t appear at least occasionally troubled by the demands of our regimen was the Viper ACR. Each of the other cars managed to overheat something, even if it was only the brake fluid.

So the Z06 was pretty well-behaved during PCOTY. It’s easy to see, however, that unless your favorite local racetrack is one of those Canadian snow courses where they put spiked tires on old Vettes (meaning Chevettes) and run them until somebody crashes into a wall of ice, you’re going to occasionally face heat-related issues using this remarkably powerful and hugely complex sportscar in open-lapping sessions. Which raises the question: Is this Corvette Z06 really a Z06 at all?

Think about it. Fifteen years ago, the C5-generation Z06 quickly earned a reputation as the fastest and most capable off-the-showroom-floor trackday car that sub-Ferrari money could buy. Those early cars weren’t perfect—they had transmission heat issues of their own, and experienced Z06 pilots quickly learned to bring extra brake discs to the track with them—but they were, and to an extent still remain, the gold standard for a “fast car” in HPDE or club events.

The C6 Z06 took that formula and cranked it up with a lightweight subframe and even more power from a seven-liter small-block. It’s a rare “supercar” that can put any distance on a well-driven C6 Z06 around a track, even today. After the Z06 debuted to universal acclaim, Chevrolet introduced the supercharged ZR1 to fill the Maximum Corvette role among people who simply wanted more straight-line power and weren’t interested in things like heat soak or brake costs over the course of a ten-event open-lapping season.

photos by Mat Tierney