Ciro Pabòn wrote:
Well, just to say to Reca that here in America we have an option for the Corvette, called the Lingenfelter 427 twin turbo...
With that, you don't worry so much about tires.
Thanks for the Road & Track article. I wonder why they did not test the Golf HPA R32 (best bang for the buck?), the Viper 1100TT or the Mercedes GLK. They don't have so much sex-appeal but they seem nice cars to me.
I share Tom's and Ray point of view. My old Goat is funny when you wet the drum brakes. This thing weights like 120 imperial tonnes give or take a few (that's like 3 million grams, expressed in euros) and when the brakes are wet, I swear it has a system to increase the mass by 200%. It works wonders for your left foot braking!
The test was made by Quattroruote to compare on track the cars of the “Club of the 4 seconds”, referring to the 0-100km/h for “normal” production cars (not purposely tuned cars but the ones normally available). Then they probably picked 3 European and 3 American cars because they did it in collaboration with R&T so wanted to make something interesting for both. The questionable choice IMO is the 911Turbo instead of the GT3, it’s true that the latter loses a couple of tenths in acceleration so it’s a bit over 4”, but it’s the 911 of “normal” production more biased towards track performance so for that test would have made more sense.
As for the Viper, the only one available here is the SRT10 and costs about 115k € like the GT3.
Anyway don’t get me wrong, I actually don’t care much about the few tenths difference in laptimes or accelerations between these cars in the hands of experienced test drivers, even if I had the money to buy either of them certainly my choice wouldn’t be driven by that, I wouldn’t look for that kind of performance. I had a few trips on the track with cars powerful enough to understand that something also seconds slower is already more than you are ever going to need and that lot of practice is required to get even vaguely close to cornering potential of similar cars, let alone be able to find the difference at the limit between a Z06 and a F430. (For instance the car that gave me most fun on the track was a Fiat Barchetta, I didn’t get over 160-165 km/h, but without roof, helmet on, car floating and jumping over kerbs it was lot of fun. When I drove a 4S I was too worried about the risk to put it on the wall for having time to enjoy my driving turn)
It’s just that, if we really want to look at the data of absolute performance, let’s do it right, comparing apple with apple and orange with orange, so put similar performance tyres on both cars and you see that the money the F430 asks more actually mean something on the track too, even if that’s not the main reason someone decide to puts on the table for it enough money to have a small apartment. And I think it’s pretty clear from the article that also the American journalists notice it’s much more than speed. The F430 doesn’t cost almost twice the Z06 just because it’s a couple of seconds faster. At that level of performance even the slowest is fast enough anyway.
West wrote:
Not knocking the Ferrari but where I live (southern California) everybody has a European car and everybody pretends they're rich or successful because of it.
Well, if they do it solely for that reason those are definitively snobs. But that doesn’t mean that your experience applies on this side of the ocean, here the European cars aren’t really that exotic
And you can bet I wasn’t trying to knock down the Z06 either, the only point I was trying to make was to explain the reasons the Z06 doesn’t have much success over here, it’s just that here isn’t as cheap as it’s in US, it costs basically same as a Porsche 911.
And given that money aren’t a factor most of people prefer to renounce to the performance advantage of the Z06 and pick the 911 or maybe even a Jaguar XKR or a BMW 6 Series or a Mercedes CLS, all are in that money range for both purchase (around 80-100k €) and daily driving (not few thousand € per year).
It’s not about being European snobs, jerks and idiots as your country fellow not very nicely suggested.
It’s just that for most of people those fits better with what they need from a road car for that kind of money, they are all different and focusing on different qualities obviously because the drivers are but mostly they cover the different requirements of European drivers better than the Z06 does.
I've been through 4 Peugeots and 2 Renaults... it must be our tropical weather.