[VIDEO] CAR Offers First Look at an Export C8 Z06, Includes Ride-Along with a Porsche 911 GT3 RS

“The noise it makes isn’t particularly memorable…” is a sentence we never thought someone would work into a C8 Z06 review! But here we are; LT6 monsters with muted Stingray-style corner-exit pipes have started shipping to the old world. So many of the places that General Motors chose to exalt with its finest-ever piece of machinery feature governments that have declared war on exciting cars, one regulation at a time – with substantial attention paid to emissions and decibel levels.

Unfortunately, despite representing one of Britain’s most respected automotive publications, reviewer James Dennison neglected to mention the downgrades that his leaders forced Chevrolet to make to its halo car in order to sell it in Europe, but for those of us lucky enough to live in the Land of the Free, its the note being choked out by our favorite songbird during its “holiday” in the Welsh countryside that stands out as the most jarring part of his otherwise beautifully produced video! So, we have a Z06 and the gnarliest current-gen Porsche 911 in Wales with a professional camera crew in tow. That alone should be worth 20 minutes of your time, and with our main gripe out of the way above, we wholeheartedly recommend the most recent CAR cinematic to our readers!

Here in Corvetteland, we’ve never seen anything like the other undisputed highlight of the vid; the aero kit that Porsche fitted to the most recent GT3 RS. The 992 GT3 RS makes so much downforce that even with “just” 518 HP, it would be favored in a track battle (sadly absent from this comparison) with just about anything on the market today – as seen Stateside when Cammisa and Pobst introduced it to the Z06 at Willow Springs Raceway. The RS’ otherworldly wing deserves some context! Before you hit play, try these numbers on for size!

Per the video, the 3RS’ aero, led by its bi-plane wing, makes twice as much downforce as its predecessor and 3x as much as the current GT3 that the Z06 is so often compared to. The claim that it makes 5x as much as the Z07 might not be accurate – it’s hard to tell when everyone is calculating at different speeds – but while the Z has air pushing down on it with the weight of five un-tapped kegs at 186 MPH, the RS has a metaphorical full-grown bison sitting on its roof ten MPH sooner which even bests the one-time downforce champion Gen-V Viper ACR Extreme by nearly 200 pounds! This all makes us wonder if we’ll ever see a full-blown “downforce Corvette” offered from the factory (we also wonder if such a thing is something that we even want as the Corvette has always been an engine-dominated affair), but it’s an interesting concept to ponder, especially when you see what a road car is capable of! Either way, enjoy the video; we bet we’ll be seeing a lot more of this ultimate Porsche and its likely impending forced-induction GT2-version as the C8 Corvette lineup continues to expand! We can’t wait to see the 850+ HP ZR1 tangle with these big-winged monsters in a power vs. aero battle for world domination – and we don’t think we’ll be waiting that much longer!

Source:
CAR Magazine / YouTube

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