This place has electricity to it. Like the hopes and dreams of hundreds of people get met there every single week. It is staffed by die-hards, some of the most knowledgeable people you will ever meet regarding one subset of one of the largest brands on the planet. Every one of them knows their craft, their product, and the expectations. We see the fresh C8s lined up on Corvette Boulevard, one Seawolf Gray Z06 stands out and a Red Mist Stinrgray is getting delivered as we watch. Joy, pure and simple joy. These are people whose mission is to make a person feel special – and they knock it out of the park every single time. The National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green Kentucky is a living and breathing thing, with a pulse and a notable air of excitement.
After a tour, we enjoy local craft bourbons under the high rotunda. Surrounded by priceless one-offs and experimental vehicles made for singular individuals with singular purposes. The net result – speed. An after hours cocktail party in a museum is cool, an after hours cocktail party at the National Corvette Museum is a type of surreal that is actually hard to explain as a gearhead.
We say hello to the world renowned sinkhole that swallowed half a dozen cars, completely destroyed two, and the rest were painstakingly restored by these local craftsmen and women. We look above to the luminaries: Zora, Pratt & Miller, and even Mr. Hendrick – that have pinned their successes to this brand and brought it to new heights. From a body-on frame and Fire-Ball Inline-6 with a 2-speed powerglide we see a linear progression. From some of the most stylish cars of their day to some of the most hardcore track cars ever to race in the sporting classes – the entire relentless march of Corvette Development was leading it to put the engine behind you and directly next to your head.
More specifically, all roads lead to experiencing all of the Chevrolet Corvette Lineup on the track. Normally that would be met with something about oversteer, but in this case the criticism is muted quickly and permanently with a test of the various suspension modes of the C8 Stingray on the short course. The game was follow the leader – the leader was a professional driver. I was the first follower with a compatriot from Illinois in hot pursuit. We went through the winding bends that replicated the Corkscrew of Leguna Seca fame in tour mode – genuinely enjoying the spirited driving and nice ride of the C8 in Touring Mode.
Then we popped it into Sport mode. The exhaust baffles opened up and we could really hear that 6.2L Direct Injected V8 sing. We kept within the 2 car length parameter as the C8 chassis and suspension found the grip to pull incredible speeds through the corners. Before we were done with the two laps in sport mode, we had lapped the last group. The 6.2L singing the song of its people deep through the 6,000 RPM Range most of the time (it wasnt mine).
In track mode, the 2024 Chevrolet Corvette is basically a supercar that grew out from your extremities. Point the steering wheel where you want to go, get the right cornering speed and cornering gear – nip the apex, maintain the throttle, and you’re off! All with a raucous baritone V8 howling away mere inches from your head and an incredible intelligent traction control system that gets you on the power just right as youre exiting the corner. Point and shoot. This is the base car. You can do this for right around 80k and embarrass a lot of your friends with 911s.
The PDR is catching the bedlam as sure enough we get group two in our sights on the first lap of track mode” and quickly overtake. The walkie talkie is ablaze with instruction and the laps fall away easily and in the most satisfying manner possible. This car is telepathic in the corners, and the computers are there to help stop you from killing yourself, while going around the track as fast as possible. This is why you buy one of these cars. Because you never know who youre going to lap. We catch up with the instructor and he reveals that hes never lapped another group – let alone both. My new friend from Indiana just found a new wingman for the rest of the day. They do not make a Porsche this charismatic. And to go a LOT faster youre spending several hundred thousand dollars.
We head in for a technical debriefing. The difference between the drive modes is intense, and we heed some of the warnings about driving in track mode not on a track. Because it stiffens up the suspension so much, Track mode is really reserved for the velvet smoothness of a road course or professional race track. If you use Track mode in the real world with things like potholes and different graded roads – you run the risk of absolutely catastrophic damage to your Corvette. Tires, suspension, and even chassis damage have resulted from non-track use of Track mode suspension settings, so just remember that when youre setting up your Z mode. Track Suspension is for track situations only – or it will be expensive! We hear the real-world horror stories of vehicles with a few hundred miles on them, waited for for months – only to be nearly totalled with this mistake. Noted!
Next up is the E-Ray. If youve ever wanted to drive a Corvette all through a WNY winter- this is the first one that can do it without the addition of copious amounts of tube sand. Weve all seen the guy on 104 with the C6 all winter, and that guy is legitimately my hero – being a walking retort to the idea that you NEED 4WD. However, the E-ray utilized the existing architecture of the C8 to make an AWD monster with instantaneous FWD torque complemented by the 6.2L V8 in the back. This car is insane, and we love it!
When going over the debriefing of the C8 E-Ray, I was impressed to find out that Detroit has a lot of these roaming the streets in the winter. This is the one my dad wants for this exact reason. However, it is a real, honest to god AWD Corvette, and we had access to the cutaway car that showed how this technology was possible.
The first thing that you notice is the transmission tunnel that used to link the engine in the front to the transmission in the back in the C7. This has now been filled with batteries, and in the frunk Y-Beam setup you have an electric motor. Thats right, the C8 hybrid was built into the plans from the beginning. With the body cutaway, you see just how this chassis took shape. It is strong, sturdy, and intelligently designed to not give a ton of flex and let the MagRide suspension do the hard work of making it comfortable. Theres tons of stiffening buttresses, as you get the sense that even though this is a small, mid-engined sports car – its safe and controllable. It was even alluded to that the C7 was possibly going to receive a hybrid variant along the same lines.
Is the E-Ray a Hybrid? Technically yes, but more Formula 1 than Prius or Volt. You dont charge an E-Ray. You use the kinetic energy created by slowing the car down into the corners to charge the batteries that then deploy electrical power to propel you out of the corners even faster. The amount that you can charge into this car is impressive, and the Carbon Ceramic brakes that come standard dont fade until well after they are on fire!
Getting to grips with the AWD, 4,000lb. Corvette was an experience. The way that this car launches is satisfying to a fault. Silent electric torque pulling you forward while the 6.2L V8 winds itself deep into the RPM range for maximum power getting intelligently sent to the rear wheels for 60 MPH in 2.5 seconds. Through the corners it was a bit heavier than the standard car that we spent all morning thrashing, but the way that the front end pulls you through the corners makes it a genuinely satisfying experience to get right, and then immediately back on that massive throttle to the next set of corners.
Its smart, elegant, violent, and comfortable – which makes this a genuine competitor to the Euro Hybrid Supercar market at a fraction of the price. You can drive this car in fully electric mode up to 45 MPH, but youll run the battery dead in about 3 miles. Perfect for sneaking out of your cul de sac without waking any of the neighbors with the 6.2L atom-bomb.
Then more debriefing, which was a welcome decompression from an intense and visceral experience.
Now we get to chase a Z06 around the long course. The first corner is a reverse image of turns 1-2 at Circuit of the Americas – so you better aim wide, and pray Max Verstappen isnt arriving at roughly the same time! The walkie-talkies bark with instruction, myself and my comrade from Indiana are off – hot in pursuit of a bona-fide, out of the box, 5.5L Flat-Planed Crank race car, driven by a professional. On Camera. With Audio feeding from inside the car to telegraph our painful errors.
The entire drivers briefing goes out the window with the first corner, as the red mist descends and were locked onto our instructor. The 6.2L howls behind me as I pull and hold in the downshift paddle going into turns one and two to get the lowest available gear to scream on the march to 3-4-5 pulling 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. We are in it. A flurry of long winding straights with the racing line falling before us set up, as we go into a technical section designed to try to bring the back end around and straighten back out as fast as possible to get back on the power. A dizzying barrage of right and lefts at different speeds, in different gears and with completely different apexes sprawls before us, and we devour every second of it. Keeping in close contact with our racing driver guide, we get the tail out a bit in some of the lower speed corners out of simple minded terror rather than racing prowess. The suspension is absolutely sublime, and the grip is intoxicating as we wind our way down the road at blistering speeds making more than a couple of errors.
In the technical corners, this car is effortless. Getting the entry speed and apex right is super important, but with some cones and a professional guiding you its completely manageable. In the long, winding corners its like making the jump to hyperspace. In your classic parkway test, you could go from 390 to Hamlin Beach before the end of Free Bird at this pace. And were getting paid for this. We are mere mortals, wailing on Bowling Greens glorious creations, in their backyard, with professional supervision, a day after drinking all of their bourbon. What is reality?
Our time is up, we head back to the pits, and the pulse comes down a couple of hundred BPM.
This is incredibly short lived though, as the Pros get to take us for a ride in the Z06 at full tilt. When the LT6 barks into life, the number of truly earth-shattering riffs in all of music come to mind is limitless. At idle it has a bit of Gershwins, Rhapsody in Blue with a staccato and face paced idle that is ready for the real show. The power progression is insanely linear, and the glorious tenor LT6 5.5L V8 is heaven on earth. It is absolute exquisite ultraviolence of the highest order, and the way that those Carbon Ceramics slow you down is something straight out of sim racing. If you want an out of the box race car that moves you on an audio and lateral-Gs level- the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 is a half price Ferrari, McLaren, or Porsche. With more emotion, and better standard equipment. And it works as a car that you can use every single day.
I asked the racing driver taking me around, how many people who buy this are going to be able to use ALL of it? He responded with a no nonsense, like 1% and that was completely satisfactory. The way that the 5.5L naturally aspirated LT6 revs is truly intoxicating, and bouncing it off the rev limiter you get the very real sense that this is a high strung thoroughbred. Many cars will go fast in a straight line, but the composed and violent nature of the way that this car can go through a set of corners on the ragged edge of its grip is astonishing. The best part is that the Carbon Ceramics will literally light on fire before they start to fade, and the way it grabs you at 120 and deposits you at 40 by the apex while giving you all of the grip that the chassis, suspension, aero, and track can muster is something that needs to be felt to be believed.
The Z06 is an absolutely mental car. It is one of the most out-of-the-box track-ready weapons that we have ever seen, with all of the ground-effects aerodynamics and high-revving goodness to back it up. This is a car for the terminally unhinged. As a result, it is absolutely perfect in the way it plugs itself into your adrenal system. Several years ago, the Renault F1 team programmed their car to sing “God Save the Queen through the revs. Someone needs to come out with a tune that will make the LT6 do Last Dance With Mary Jane, because who doesnt want to hear that?
The rest of the training revolved around how to make the delivery experience memorable, various marketing facts about the Corvette, and the way that the development of this car has really been the culmination of the life’s work of several of the brightest engineers ever to work for General Motors. The first character that we looked at was Zora Arkus-Duntoff, a Belgian born Americanized engineer who is actually interred with his wife IN the Corvette Museum. Zora was a genuinely interesting guy and there are tons of articles that detail his incredible involvement with Corvette, but we are going to do the cliffsnotes. Zora made the Corvette a serious racing platform, pitching and building mid-engine concepts as far back as the 60s. This was the era when Formula 1 took latent aerodynamic and physics lessons and applied them to going through the streets of a Belgian or French town or an abandoned RAF Air Force base at incredible speeds while Chevrolet were building the gorgeous, but comparatively primitive C2. There are some great easter eggs, including a bust of Zora put on the windshield to pay homage to this pioneering engineer. Some of his examples were in the museum, and it was abundantly clear he was benchmarking Colin Chapman for some of these early attempts.
The second person that we need to thank for this is Tadge Juchter, Executive Chief Engineer for both the C7 and C8 Corvettes. Hes the guy who made the C7 an almost perfect grand tourer, and decided to take the next generation Corvette Mid-Engine. For that, we owe him many thanks, because the C8 corners with the best of what Europe has to offer. Even better, the Magride 3 and 4 on Corvette C8 has been licensed by Ferrari and Lamborghini – two companies that know a thing or two about producing a charismatic mid-engine screamer. Tadge, we raised the final old-fashioned of the weekend to you! What you built is incredible – and we can’t wait to see what is coming down the pipe.
Turns out, what was coming down the pipe is the ZR1 – a 1,064 HP, twin-turbocharged 5.5L, active aerodynamicd monster. The split window is back, and for the first time you can get a factory twin-turbocharged Corvette. Those turbos, which are a whopping 76 mm each, utilize anti lag technology to feed in the boost throughout the entirety of the 5.5L V8s massive torque curve. The Z06 is mental, but ZR1 is going to be a bold, incredibly loud retort to the concept that America cant build a Hypercar. It is a rare, incredibly interesting piece of engineering that works well at 495, 620, 670, and over 1,000 horsepower – but it does! The base car is right at the edge of most drivers skill level, but it is smart enough to get you around the track in one piece. The AWD E-Ray and screaming Z06 are two sides of the same coin – how do we use technology to liven up something that is already really good. Easy! Make it rev to a billion, or give it AWD and figure out a way to rig up your Thule and hit the slopes. Then turbocharge the already-insane smaller revvy V8, and give that one a hybrid set up too. Then take it to the Nurburgring to bother the continental powers! We named that one after the man himself – it’s called Zora.
The Corvette hasnt had this much real world clout since the people driving them paid a dollar for theirs and then went to the moon. With the C8 though, it feels like it’s already been there on its way to Mars or the Kuiper Belt. That this uncompromising, well-built road-warrior was launched upon its inception deep into the cosmos and into the collective American unconsciousness as a very physical reminder of just how good a car can be. In 68 when those brave and opportunistic lads got their $1 Corvette leases, the overall vibe of the country was not great. Political assassinations, civil unrest, economic woes, even the specter of nuclear war, and the escalation of Vietnam clung to the end of that decade like a bad smell. In times of truly great strife, the Corvette serves as a constant reminder of the adage, shoot for the moon, because even if you miss youll land among the stars! You might never own a Ferrari, but why would you want to when you can use your Z06 every single day? When you can get it serviced down the street – by guys named AJ, Chris, and Bob? This isnt a new Corvette, this is the new yardstick that all fast, flashy mid-engine cars are going to be measured by because of its truly unbelievable level of engineering. Tadge, you knocked this one out of the park. GM, thank you for making the most charismatic car that is so readily attainable and customizable.
Of course, as always if you want a National Corvette Museum Delivery Experience, contact us at Cavallaro-Neubauer Chevrolet in Williamson to make it happen. These people do an incredible job, and it is well worth saving the destination fee. Envelop yourself in the lore and legacy of one of the best racing brands in America that started off life getting pinged for a flag code violation. This is one experience that is well worth it, and we cannot recommend it enough.
We would like to thank all of the staff at the National Corvette Museum as well as the trainers brought in for Corvette Academy – these are absolutely top notch people who put together an incredible experience. I would also like to thank Joe, Tony, and Rick for recognizing that the safest place for us to do automotive journalism like this is on a track – with cars that our customers DO NOT OWN AND WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO BUY!
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