Page 44 - Motor Trend (February 2020)

communicative, responsive, and easy to
There are five dials on the Porsche’s screen, but you can’t
see two of them because the steering wheel is in the way.
interior, and it carries 61 percent of its
weight on the rear wheels to the 911’s 64
percent. The Corvette’s 6.2-liter V-8’s 52
extra horsepower offset its extra weight
for a superior weight to power ratio of 7.3
pounds per hp to the 911’s 7.6.
The 911’s turbocharged flat-six is down
80 lb-ft of torque against the ’Vette, too,
but you wouldn’t know it from the stop-
watch. Be it 495 American ponies and 470
lb-ft from eight free-breathing cylinders
fed to a Tremec eight-speed dual-clutch
auto or 443 German thoroughbreds and
390 lb-ft from six pressurized pistons
behind a Porsche eight-speed dual-clutch,
you’re getting to 60 mph from a dead stop
in less than 3.0 seconds.
With the Porsche, it takes only 2.9
seconds, but the Corvette needs just 2.8,
making it the quickest factory Corvette to
60 mph in history. The advantage carries
through the quarter, the Corvette trapping remind everyone you have “burnout
in 11.1 seconds at 123.2 mph and the 911 in
11.2 seconds at 124.3. And these are essen-
tially the base versions of each car.
Oddly, the Porsche looks and feels
quicker. Something about the midrange
oomph provided by the turbochargers
gives the 911 a feeling of supercar urgency,
from a stop or a roll, that the ultra-smooth
Corvette lacks. The ’Vette’s big V-8’s power to the 911’s non-Corsa Pirelli P Zeros, the
delivery is so smooth and so consistent
everywhere in the rev range that it never
44 MOTORTREND.COM FEBRUARY 2020
feels like you’ve just hit hyperdrive. The
cabin is so isolated that you never feel like
you’re going as fast as you are. It just goes.
Provided it has grip, of course. We found
the Corvette much more sensitive to the
road surface than the 911 despite equally
good launch control systems, which can
cost precious tenths when your pride is
on the line. If you do lose by a nose, just
mode” by grabbing both paddles, giving
it the beans, and releasing the paddles
to dump the clutch for a smoke show.
Porsche people have to buy a GT3 at half
again the cost to get that.
It isn’t just the rear end of the Corvette
that is sensitive to grip. Even with slightly
stickier Michelin Pilot Sport 4S rubber
Corvette manages 1.04 average lateral g on
our skidpad to the 911’s 1.09.
The Corvette’s default limit-handling
behavior is big, fat midcorner understeer,
and it shows in the figure-eight laps. The
Carrera laid down a truly blistering 22.7-
second lap at 0.94 average cumulative
g to the Corvette’s significantly slower
23.3-second lap at only 0.90 g. That’s just
barely quicker than the previous gener-
ation’s Z51, which figure-eight master
Kim Reynolds always found to be an
unpredictable mess in this test despite the
numbers it put up. He finds this new car
drive (despite said understeer).
So how did that big midcorner push get
past the Corvette engineers? We don’t
think it did. We think it’s intentional,
especially with the suspension in Street
alignment. The vast majority of Corvettes
sold are base models, and the vast majority
of customers will never have driven a
mid-engine car before, much less one this
quick. Understeer is safe, in that it makes it
very difficult for the car to oversteer—and
when this car does oversteer, it’s a very fine
line between a sweet little drift and going
backward off the road. Drivers who prefer
exploring varying degrees of the safety
net can choose from ESC Competitive
mode when the car is in Sport mode (it’s
plenty lenient) or one of five Performance
Traction Management modes with
decreasing levels of computer assistance
and intervention.
The figure eight is not the real world,
though. It’s not even a racetrack. For that,
Chevy recommends a different Track
alignment, which changes camber, caster,
toe, and tire pressure settings. We were
short on notice and driving an early-build
Corvette (VIN No. 10) restricted in its
comings and goings per Chevy PR minders.
We couldn’t get a proper racetrack, either,
so we improvised and marked out a closed
loop of road roughly 3.5 miles long.
Test wizard and serious hot shoe Chris
Walton and I would do a few timed laps
each to see if one car was consistently
faster with different semi-pro drivers
aboard, and one was. In Walton’s hands,
the 911 was 1.1 seconds faster per lap. In
mine, 0.6 second faster.
We found the same advantages in the
Porsche: more midcorner grip allowing us
to carry higher cornering speeds and get on
the throttle earlier when exiting a corner,
as well as more steering feel and better
brake feel at the limit.
The Corvette’s brake-by-wire pedal was
a particular point of contention among the
editors who had a go in both cars. Some
had no issue with it. Others noted it would
get into ABS before the pedal reached the
end of its travel but disagreed about the
difficultly in modulating braking once
ABS was reached. Walton and I, crazy
late brakers that we are, felt we didn’t get
enough feedback from the pedal and had
to learn to anticipate when ABS would kick
in while also trying to slow for corners and
get the best lap time.
The resistance in the pedal didn’t feel
proportional to the braking force, making
it feel as if the brakes were fading. Bumpy
braking zones only made matters worse
in the Corvette, as the front wheels fought