“It’s a great machine,” said one of the brightest young marketing and advertising types within the Chevrolet organization in an effort to describe the Corvette. “But it’s not a terribly useful device. The present Corvette is more like a dune buggy than a conventional GT or sports car in that it can’t do much that a functional automobile is expected to do.” He is in many ways correct. The Corvette, with its giant engine and muscular drivetrain, packed into its space-age body, leaves precious little room for the human element. It is questionable, for example, that a couple could load aboard enough luggage for a civilized one-week journey without serious inconvenience. At the same time, the machine has such an excess of power that prolonged driving on ice and snow would become a frustrating and worrisome task.
But on dry pavement, with no place to go except a carefree spin down some interesting roads, the Corvette is an ever-loving kick. The controls are nearly perfect, the throttle, clutch and brake pedals flawlessly placed, with smooth linkages that belie the potency of the car. The close-ratio manual transmission is a joy to operate, and the suspension—firm at low speeds, but perfect from 70 mph upward—is ideally suited for the automobile. In fact, one of the most extraordinary things about the Corvette is its overall smoothness. Most cars having an excess of 400 hp are jerky, neck-snapping, uncivilized and bull-like, but the Corvette’s controls are so well designed that utter novices can jump aboard and drive like veterans—up to a point. It has been a long-standing Chevrolet policy to give their high-performance engines great smoothness, with none of the tricky carburetor gimmicks that bring on a great thrust of power whenever the throttle is opened. The throats of the three 2-barrel carbs are controlled by air flow rather than mechanical linkage, giving the engine a turbinelike smoothness. If power did come in with a bang, as on some other high-performance machines, the Corvette would be a fearsome racer, safe only in the hands of responsible professionals. As it is, only imprudent applications of power on wet or loose surfaces can be dangerous, for which most of those eager young customers should be thankful.
This overall élan of the Corvette makes its performance deceiving. In spite of all the sensory inputs, it never seems as if you’re going that fast. Power comes so effortlessly that neither car nor driver is ever called upon to strain in the slightest. Almost anyone, for example, could run the car through the quarter-mile in excess of 100 mph. An interesting test of truly powerful cars is the 0-100-0 run, wherein the time to accelerate to 100 mph and brake to a full stop is recorded. The best clocking we know of for a street automobile is Ken Miles’ 14 seconds in a 427 Cobra. A number of years ago Aston Martin advertised that its big Sixes would do the job in 25 seconds. We tried it once with the Corvette. On a bumpy pavement, with a less-than-perfect start, we made the trip in approximately 23 seconds. More practice and it is probable that the time could have been brought down near 21 seconds. With better tires another two seconds might have been shaved off. And therein lies the flabbiness in the Corvette’s muscle…tires. The F70-type employed on the car are simply inadequate under heavy throttle and braking. They smoke, they screech, they lose adhesion, they are squirrelly in the rain. Duntov himself was hospitalized during the preparation of this test and we had no chance to discuss the problem with him, but he has said on past occasions that he is aware of the problem, but can find no other tires that work better. The owner’s manual firmly warns that the car’s suspension has been designed for these specific tires and no replacements should be tried. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to experiment.
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