Is the C8 Z06 a Supercar? To Find Out, MotorTrend Tests it Against Heavy Hitters from McLaren and Lamborghini

Christmas is here in early December for Corvette fans; some glaring issues might turn it into a Griswold family Christmas by the end, but those are still good for a laugh! After an excruciating 3-year hiatus, the best Corvette model is back on the market to officially “put the world on notice.” For the second day in a row, we’ve been gifted professional Z06 content; it’s like our very own 670-HP Advent Calendar, and this time our Secret Santa is Motor Trend. From there, it gets even better, as the California-based publication was also nice enough to include a Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica and an otherworldly McLaren 765LT Spider as party favor benchmarks to test the newest ‘Vette’s worthiness of the title of “supercar.”

The Competitors

Our carbon-clad $164,805 hero is up against some McGwire-level hitters this time around, starting with one of its only direct competitors left standing in the Nat-Asp, RWD performance market. Unlike the incredible Hagerty video from last week, MT was able to get their mitts on the correct V10 howler from the Volkswagen group. With a rating of 631, the Huracán Tecnica’s 5.2L mill is 69 horses healthier than the one in its Audi sibling. It also arrived in trimmer coupe form, giving it and the Z06 identical 5.5 pounds per horsepower to weight ratios. This second-most extreme branch of the Huracán tree checks in with an MSRP of $332,095, or almost exactly double that of the Z06.

Add a third Z06 to the bottom line, and you end up just $3,605 over the McLaren’s eyewatering $490,810 sticker. It backs up that impressive sum with a spec sheet that we hope the forthcoming ZR1 has in its crosshairs. The 765LT’s 4.0L V8 is twin-turbocharged to the tune of 755 horses under McLaren’s notoriously sandbag-y rating system – it’s really 800 HP, easy. Even more devastating is the fact that it out-twists the Corvette by 130 lb-ft and the Lambo by 173! Built around a Carbon tub, it is also far and away the featherweight of the group with its 3,223-lb. curb weight undercutting the Z06’s mark by 463.

The Tests

With the underlying question, “is the Z06 finally a legitimate Corvette Supercar?” in mind, we will mostly skip over the engine, transmission, and chassis evaluation bits because we already know that those components are world-class. One quick pitstop, though, the Z’s dual-clutch performed so well that it made one Motor Trender pay it the highest compliment that they know over there: “They’ve cracked the Porsche PDK code. This thing shifts as well as any Porsche I have driven.”

Now, we will get into the testing portion of the comparison, where Clark brings home a tree with a squirrel living in it and unknowingly locks himself in the attic. After the whooping we witnessed the Z06 put on the GT3 yesterday, MT’s acceleration assessment seems a little suspect. The Z06 tied the Lambo to 60 MPH, but its co-first place here is still two-tenths slower than what Hagerty and Cammisa’s crew achieved in the GT3 clip. From there, it gets worse, and the Z is in third place at the quarter-mile-marker. We knew the NA’ Vette wouldn’t be a match for the boosted Brit and its astonishing 10.3-second run at 142.6 mph, but the Rapid Blue Z06 in this test is .3 seconds and 3 mph slower than the Black over Red example we saw yesterday. The Huracán beats this Z06 by two-tenths, but with less aero drag, it is also traveling 3 mph faster than even the Camissa’ Vette, which left us quite impressed.

As we’ve come to expect since the C6 was sitting in showrooms, though, braking and turning tests are where America’s SUPERcar really struts its stuff. McLaren set the highwater mark in stopping from 60, but from 100 mph, the Z returned the favor, stopping two feet shorter than the big Mac (which is aided by an air brake) and six feet shorter than the Bull’s best effort. On pedal feel, the McLaren took top honors, followed by the American, with Lamborghini’s only finding critics. At the tough figure-eight, the Z06 and the 765 registered the two fastest laps Motor Trend has ever recorded. The Corvette was in first for a few minutes with its 21.9-second result, but the Long Tail’s eventual 21.8 relegated it to second all-time, not too shabby! The Lambo? Waaay back at 22.6 seconds of elapsed time.

The final exam was called “how they work as cars,” and the Z06 absolutely runs away with this category. MT went so far as to say that the newest Corvette was the only car there that “sane adults would contemplate driving for more than an hour” and that the ‘Vette’s Tour Mode “is far and away the quietest and most comfortable by several orders of magnitude,” and piling on with, “its comfy seats are heated and cooled, you can hear and enjoy its Bose sound system, and there’s room to carry up to 12.6 cubic feet of luggage.” By comparison, the Lamborghini is “deafening,” and its frunk barely accepts one helmet. The driver’s seat in the McLaren “becomes a borderline torture devise after 10 minutes,” its buttons are “inscrutable,” its automatic climate control “isn’t,” and its sound system is “hopelessly outmatched by the V8” that makes a sound was earlier described as “vastly less pleasing” than the powerplants in the NA cars.

The Verdict

While MT decides to crown the Z06 a genuine supercar, answering their original premise, the LT6 beast that easily seems like the best all-arounder with the should-be death blow of owning an MSRP half or one-third as expensive as the others is somehow given the silver medal. The glaring omission from this test is a set of actual track times. Motor Trend moving on from – and not even attempting to replace – Randy Pobst is where they set fire to the Christmas tree. Sure, Camissa HAD Randy at Willow Springs and failed to get lap times (or, hopefully, just hasn’t shared them because the focus of that particular video was drag racing), but MT having a Z07 and McLaren’s most hard-core mass-produced model on hand and only throwing them down a public road is a real travesty that should give this test an asterisk, just like Mark McGwire’s home run tallies!

Source:
MotorTrend

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