I was recently reminded that comparing cars to ladies is beyond cliché and sexist. Yet, once I settled on one particular comparison, I couldn’t shake it from my consciousness.

Every move made by the new Corvette Z06 brought to mind Miranda Lambert. Not the newly single, thinner Miranda. Naw, I mean Kerosene Miranda: more dramatic than you can handle, prettier than you will admit and better than most will ever know.

She’s at the bar after having already downed two shots of bourbon. The right word will get you a dance. The wrong one gets you punched. Do you have the guts to approach? With 650 horsepower on tap, you better be damn sure.

(Read More…)

Now it can be told: Perhaps the most cringe-worthy moment of my life was my own “Affluenza” episode, otherwise known as “The Time I Wrote A Poem About Not Getting A BMW 2002 For Christmas.”

I was eighteen years old and busy failing to fulfill my potential at university. I was already on my second car, the infamous Red Marquis, having unceremoniously crashed my 200SX on my first unsupervised day as a temporary-license holder. During one of our brief telephone conversations that fall, my father asked me some questions about “old BMWs,” with particular focus on the 2002. My fevered imagination had grasped that straw and run with it until I was honestly surprised to get two sweaters and a couple of shirts on the blessed morning of the 25th.

I went back to school early so I could mope in private and write a poem about it, the worst couplets of which I’ve retrieved from memory for your amusement:

(Read More…)

Editor’s note: Outside of our exclusive scoop of Volkswagen’s Goodwill Package, news that a Corvette Z06’s engine failed at the hands of a Fox News journalist was our top daily news piece of the last 12 months. It originally ran July 18th, 2015. The cause of the failure is explained here, though whether that is the true reason of the failure is open to discussion.

While track testing the latest Z06 Corvette, Gary Gastelu of Fox News experienced an issue that’s becoming a trend for Chevrolet’s supercharged sports car: engine failure.

“After a few lapping sessions, the engine in mine unceremoniously called it quits,” reports Gastelu in his review.

(Read More…)

When you bring your halo-of-halo sports cars to a competition to sort out the “Best Driver’s Car”, you definitely want to give it a new set of brake pads, make sure all the electrical connections are seated properly, and maybe — just maybe — not send a car that was offed in a previous comparison test.

But that’s just what Chevrolet did for this year’s edition of Motor Trend’s “Best Driver’s Car”, and it came back to bite the General — hard.

(Read More…)

After averaging fewer than 1,200 monthly spring sales in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, the launch of the C7 presented Chevrolet with more than 3,000 sales in March and in April and in May 2014.

Surely that’s all because of pent-up demand, right? After the C6 battled quite respectably through a recession, the craziness of the C7 was bound to generate a great deal of initial demand.

And yet one year later, long since its launch, the Corvette is selling just as well. Better, in fact. (Read More…)

Car and Driver thinks that this Holden Ute/Batmobile/Mad Max thing is a mule for a mid-engine Corvette. I’ll believe it when I see it. Then again, it looks like I was wrong about the upcoming Ford GT revival.

The Chevrolet Corvette is the fastest growing auto nameplate in America through the first ten months of 2014.

Four of the other members of this list of America’s fastest  growing vehicles are also General Motors products.

Corvette volume is up 146% this year, an improvement of 17,150 units. Two other nameplates, the Lexus GX and Mercedes-Benz S-Class, have both doubled their October 2013 year-to-date volume. (Read More…)

Courtesy of Stingray Forums and Jalopnik, we have our first look at the Corvette Z06 Convertible – an automatic one to boot.

(Read More…)

GM’s upcoming 8-speed automatic, dubbed the 8L90, will be a cornerstone of their new rear-wheel drive cars – and the 2015 Corvette lineup will be among the first to get it.

(Read More…)

Years ago, after my first trip to the Detroit Auto Show, I was browsing the inventory at Lamborghini of Ohio with Jack. There was snow on the ground—Phaeton weather—and the cozy showroom seemed the perfect attraction to kill a few hours before my flight back to Baltimore. Jack was going on and on about the throat-stompingly awesome Murcielago. “That’s the only one to have,” I think he said. “I dunno,” I said, “I kind of like the Gallardo.”

“That,” he replied, “is because you have girl parts.”

(Read More…)

You know how there was no 1983 Corvette, and then the C4 finally came out in 1984, and it had this terrible twin-throttle-body fuel-injection system? Of course you do. Anyway, C4 Corvettes are worth enough these days that they’re not common sights in self-service wrecking yards, and those that I do find have been picked pretty clean.. Shops that specialize in Corvettes intercept most basket-case examples before they get to these yards, but I found four C4s all together at a Southern California yard last month. Let’s check out a well-stripped example of the first of the good-handling Corvettes. (Read More…)

No specs yet but photos galore!

Just off the wires, we have word from Chevrolet that the 2015 Corvette Z06 will debut at NAIAS in January – the perfect time slot to steal some of the thunder from the Blue Oval, which will show the all-new Mustang and the F-150 to the public for the first time. Last year, Ford managed to upstage GM’s truck debuts with the surprise unveiling of the Atlas concept. Looks like GM is exacting some revenge.

The C4 Corvette is about the only Corvette that you can get for Camaro prices these days— even the 19-horsepower ’79s are worth good money now. Still, it’s pretty rare that I find a C4 at a cheap self-service wrecking yard; most of the examples I run across are melty-fiberglass burn victims, and the remainder have been picked clean. Here’s one of the latter type, discovered a few months back in Northern California. (Read More…)