Corvettes, God love 'em, have always been as American as Mom, apple pie, and the 32-ounce Big Gulp that Mom drinks to wash her pie down. Yet while these sporting Chevrolets have long amused speed-obsessed Europeans as prime icons of Yankee muscle and style, they've never really been at home in Europe, a land of puny roads, micro-machines, and fermented grape beverages served in small glasses. To European tastes, the heavy Chevys were not unlike that Big Gulp: too big, too plastic, too sugary and sloppy.
Being 4.7 inches shorter than its predecessor, the new C6 Corvette is within an inch of a Porsche 911, and Chevrolet thinks that means there might be some new business to be done in the Old World. Chevy believes that being just that useful little bit more compact and even faster than the C5, the C6 now presents a performance bargain so undeniable that even the Continent's cheese-eating surrender monkeys will be forced to show respect.
The Chevrolet folks are so confident that the C6 will successfully engage the European Union, they've boosted employment on the line at Bowling Green, Kentucky, to build as many as 3000 extra Corvettes a year, a 10 percent hike.
To make the point of its newfound Euro-friendly trimness, while highlighting new and mighty performance of the sort that plays everywhere, the Corvette's wranglers invited a contingent of American journalists to drive and experience the 2006 C6 lineup-most notably, the all-new and keenly anticipated Z06 version-on two of Europe's historic racecourses and some of the Continent's finer roads.... Read full article