CHEVY CHASE

Chevrolet is hunting Ferrari, McLaren and Porsche with the sensational new Z06

- JOHN BARKER 

THE Z06 ISN'T HARD TO FIND IN THE MULTI-storey car park; it's low, wide, festooned with wings, and looks like it's been coloured in with a highlighter pen. I expect the searing hue to be called Acid Drop or Ballistic Banana but apparently Chevy calls it Accelerate Yellow. Hmmm. Turns out that most of the Corvette colour names are similarly lame: Rapid Blue, Red Mist, Silver Flare... Which is a shame because the rest of the Z06 is a riot.

It was a bold decision by Chevrolet to make the C8 Corvette mid-engined after seven generations and almost 70 years using the classic front-engine, rear-drive layout.

It's almost as if the bosses looked at the looming electrified future and thought, well, it's now or never. Turns out that the real reason the C8 went mid-engined is the Z06, though the inevitable ZR1 version, with around 800bhp, will also benefit.

The entry-level C8 Stingray picked up multiple awards, most of them from American magazines it's true, but in one way that makes them more valid, given how revered, finely developed and successful the C7 Corvette was. We too were impressed when we tested a right-hand-drive Stingray over here (evo 303) because while it has the heart of a traditional muscle car a rumbling, 6.2-litre, pushrod V8 making 475bhp - in terms of dynamics, quality and general finesse it proved more European than any previous Corvette.

So the £82k Stingray aligns with the Porsche 911 Carrera and the Z06 squares up to the 911 GT3. And this is where it gets interesting: the Z06 is powered by a 5.5-litre V8 but it's an all-new, naturally aspirated, flat-plane-crank V8 that revs to 8600rpm and delivers 670bhp. It's called the LT6, or Gemini, and it's the world's most powerful naturally aspirated production V8.