Jeremy Clarkson Doesn’t like the New Z06
When the new C7 Corvette came out, Top Gear, and specifically Jeremy Clarkson, named it the performance car of the year for the magazine and the TV show. They heralded is the best America has offered ever in the history of the Corvette, and that it was an absolute triumph in engineering.
We too have a distinct soft spot for the new C7 Corvette, especially me since I was lapping Road America this week in one at break neck speeds, laughing my butt off as the exhaust bellowed in my ears. It was an absolute treat of a day.
But now, Clarkson has tried the latest sampling of Corvette over across the pond, the C7 Z06. In his piece in The Sunday Times, Clarkson has a few not so nice words for the new beast from Chevy. “This car was built to look good in a brochure. “The numbers and ingredients are tantalising, but this car is not a serious player in the European theatre of war. It may be able to out-accelerate just about everything, and on a skid pan the size of Texas, where there’s nothing to hit if you overstep the mark, it can generate some extraordinary lateral G. But it’s not nice to drive.
“So if you want a serious car, buy one from the continent that gave the world Shakespeare, Monet and Emerson Lake & Palmer. Europe does serious well. It does substance. It does brilliant. America does Disney. And what we have with the Z06 is Disney trying to do a hard-hitting documentary about Africa’s civil wars. Naturally, it hasn’t really worked.”
Ouch. Do you think he’s right? Or did he miss the mark?