Johnny O’Connell is in full manic race mode. Shoulders hunched. Feet dancing around the pedal box like Fred Astaire doing the tap. Slamming home the shifter like he’s punching-out some drunk.

And the boy’s flyin’. Red-line in first through third. Flat in fourth with one-fifty-five showing on the speedo at the end of the main straight. Screaming through the Esses with not the merest hint of a lift.

We’re at Virginia International Raceway, in the boonies close to the Virginia state line. Flame-haired O’Connell, top wheelman with the Corvette Racing team, still grinning from his Le Mans 24-Hour GT win, is here to show us all about Chevy’s new, shining star, the Corvette Z06.

This is GM’s brand new Euro-fighter. Five-o-five horsepower from its 7.0-liter LS7 V-8. Dry-sump lubrication. Aluminum chassis. Magnesium roof structure. And floors made of featherweight balsa wood sandwiched between layers of carbon fiber.

I tell you, if this car was any more exotic, it would be called Za-za and dance around a pole.

Click the stopwatch and you’re looking at zero to 60 mph sprinting in 3.6 seconds. In first gear. You’ll see zero to 100 in under eight. Keep your right foot planted and it won’t quit till the speedo needle is kissing the 200 mph mark. It is quite simply the best ’Vette yet.

And that’s only part of the story. When the Z06 goes on sale in late fall, it’ll cost just $65,800. That’s $87,505 less than a Ford GT, $44,570 cheaper than a Porsche 911 Turbo S. Yet it’ll run rings around both of them.

Not that there’s too much subtlety here. The Z06 is a bruiser; at idle, the giant pushrod V8 shimmies and shakes, as if it’s trying to wrestle free of its mounts. Blip the throttle and it sounds like Shrek exhaling. Dial up five grand on the tach, step off the clutch and 477 lb-ft of torque will try its best to rip the treads off the 325/30-section Goodyears.

Yet this isn’t merely a straight-line dragster. The Z06’s roots are firmly entwined in Chevy’s C6.R racing program. In fact the two cars were developed side-by-side.

Just days after the C6.R beat the Aston DBR9 at Le Mans in June, Corvette Racing’s other driver, Jan Magnusson – Johnny was busy that week – took an early production Z06 for some hot laps of the Nurburgring’s Nordschleife track.

His official time? A staggering 7 minutes 42 seconds. That’s two seconds faster than a Pagani Zonda S. Eight seconds faster than a Lamborghini Murciélago. Ten seconds faster than a McLaren Merc SLR. In fact only the $441,000 Porsche Carrera GT – at 7 minutes 32 seconds – is quicker.

Nor is this simply some big-engined version of the latest generation Corvette C6. From the outset, the Corvette engineers decided to create a true, state-of-the-art supercar. Which meant sending it to the automotive equivalent of Jenny Craig.

Instead of sticking with the C6’s super-stiff hydroformed steel chassis, they designed an all-new spaceframe from lightweight aluminum. They also switched the already featherweight aluminum front cross-member assembly to an even lighter magnesium casting.

The body itself went on the same strict diet to bring it down to just 3,147, or 233 pounds less than Ferrari’s all-aluminum F430. The front fenders were switched from glass fiber to carbon fiber. Pick one up and it weighs just two pounds. The new bolted-in roof structure is made of featherweight cast magnesium.

(this article was taken from speedtv.com)

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