Jeremy Clarkson loves the C7 Corvette Stingray. He’s called it a masterpiece, he named it Top Gear‘s 2014 Car of the Year, and he even went so far as to say that, if it didn’t have left-hand steering, he’d likely buy one. That’s about as high of praise as you can get from one of the most popular auto critics in the world. So when he “took” a Z06recently, it’s only natural that it would blow him away, right? Not so much.
Clarkson reviewed a Z06 with the Z07 Performance Package for the UK’s Sunday Times, and it was … ummm, not as flattering this time around. In short, he mentions that the car sounds like a jet, looks great, and has ridiculous straight speed. But it’s a bit squirrely for his liking.
“This car was built to look good in a brochure, Clarkson wrote. “The numbers and ingredients are tantalising, but this car is not a serious player in the European theatre of war. It may be able to out-accelerate just about everything, and on a skid pan the size of Texas, where there’s nothing to hit if you overstep the mark, it can generate some extraordinary lateral G. But it’s not nice to drive.
“So if you want a serious car, buy one from the continent that gave the world Shakespeare, Monet and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Europe does serious well. It does substance. It does brilliant. America does Disney. And what we have with the Z06 is Disney trying to do a hard-hitting documentary about Africa’s civil wars. Naturally, it hasn’t really worked.”
For those who don’t remember or aren’t aware, the brochure on the Z06 is indeed truly brutal. It has a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 that produces 650 horsepower and and 650 lb-ft of torque. It comes in either a rev-matching seven-speed manual or an eight-speed paddle-shift automatic, and puts power to the rear wheels with an electronic limited-slip differential. That setup pumps its driver from naught to 60 in just less than three seconds. Still, it didn’t live up to Clarkson’s expectations.
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