The C5 is beautifully balanced, surprisingly comfortable,
and is built to a far higher standard than any Corvette
in history. The C5 handles great on a road course, but still
reminds us of a muscle car when cruising along or accelerating
down a straight stretch. The Corvette is a beast.
The standard Corvette engine, the LS1 V8, is potent.
Stand on the throttle and it's fast traffic. It produces
350 horsepower and 375 pound-feet of torque with the six-speed
manual transmission, and 360 pound-feet with the automatic.
The Corvette is quick out of the gate, whether equipped
with the automatic or manual. While we prefer the six-speed,
we have to admit that the automatic rams its shifts home
with authority, and there's enough muscle in the LS1 V8
to cover the performance penalties associated with auto-shifters.
Miss one shift with the manual and the automatic in the
lane next door will clean your clock. The automatic does
not have a manual-shift mode, but it doesn't need one.
Unlike most ragtops, the Corvette convertible weighs about
the same as the coupe, so its acceleration is undiluted:
0-to-60 mph in less than 5 seconds with the six-speed manual
transmission, about 0.4 seconds slower with the automatic.
The only performance penalty that goes with the convertible
version is top speed. The ragtop doesn't share the coupe's
aerodynamic efficiency, so it tops out at a mere 162 mph
versus 175 mph for the coupe. Put the top down and there's
even more drag and a correspondingly lower top speed. Still,
that kind of speed will get you to the drive-in in a pretty
big hurry, and in the local slammer even faster.
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Ride quality is decidedly stiff. You don't get a sports
car's ability to change directions without snubbing body
roll and limiting up-and-down suspension motions, and when
you do those things you're obliged to accept some tradeoff
in comfort. Potholes are easily identifiable in the Corvette.
The Corvette shutters over bumps, yet they are not uncomfortably
harsh. You hear them and feel them, but they aren't jarring,
and they don't unduly upset the handling balance. Handling
is not as precise as a Porsche or BMW, there's a bit of
a dead spot in the
steering, but it's much less of a hammer than a
Viper . The Corvette offers sharp reflexes on rural roads. It
provides a superb blend of muscle and finesse, with a high
tolerance for mistakes of the enthusiastic variety. Its
brakes are nothing short of race-worthy.
There aren't any significant perform-ance distinctions
between the coupe and convertible. Chevrolet claims that
the structural design for the C5 began with the convertible,
and as a consequence no shoring-up measures were required
for the soft-top chassis. You hear the same song from almost
every purveyor of convertibles, but in this application
it seems to be true. Significantly, we didn't see a hint
of cowl shake, the time-honored malady of convertibles (wherein
the dashboard and the outside of the car oscillate at different
rates). If there is any distinction to be made between the
agility and stability of the Corvette coupe and convertible,
it would be all but impossible to discern on public roads.
Active Handling, which comes standard, gets you out
of slides before trouble strikes by applying braking to
the individual corners as needed. It uses on-board sensors
to measure yaw, lateral acceleration and steering wheel
position, and uses ABS and traction control to correct oversteer
or understeer. Corvette 
engineers
calibrated the system to limit intrusiveness, however. Aside
from an "Active Handling" message on the instrument panel,
drivers might not always realize they've been assisted.
The Z06 is an absolute joy to drive fast. We found
it rock-steady, precise, consistent, and fast at a smooth
2.2-mile road course near Las Vegas. The brakes didn't fade.
The transmission and shift linkage were solid and tight,
shifting perfectly each time, whether up or down. The handling
is balanced: The Corvette didn't understeer unless the driver
forced it to. It only oversteered in response to deliberately
crude throttle application, and then the Active Handling
brought it back into line by applying the brakes to the
outside front wheel.
