Corvette Z06 - Z07 VS Nismo GT-R and 911 Turbo S

[kevm14]

Apparently GM is suffering some preproduction teething issues with the Z06, and M/T's was not setup properly.

http://www.motortrend.com/roadtests/cou ... ck_retest/

This is good news. It sounds like it now puts the power down the way I would have expected, despite the FR setup.

The manual trans Z06 is now 0.7s faster than the NISMO was, after the rear alignment correction and Rough Track suspension setting.

[kevm14]

Interesting. They added a Rough Track mode to the suspension. I'm a little surprised this wasn't already baked in. In fact, the Nurburgring probably goes faster in Rough Track, too.

[kevm14]

Such oversights unfortunately happen with HUGELY anticipated performance cars. I don't know why automakers don't learn but they all do it. Porsche, Ferrari and Lambo all had their cases of early production cars catching on fire. Nissan had the GTR transmissions blowing up on early cars. This car went out with a misaligned rear end. It's probably the pressure of wanting the press to be able to test the car (and many magazines not just one and in different countries). They want to have the car ready for sales. I say kudos to GM for caring enough to investigate and even more respect for providing a new damper setting for rough tracks.

The new damper setting is also far, far from Ferrari, McLaren or any of the big names coming for a test to optimize their cars. The difference is that whoever buys those cars won't have that luxury. They won't be able to call up Ferrari, for example, and say "I'm going to Willow Springs this weekend for a track day. Come and optimize my tire pressures, alignment settings and traction/stability control settings for the best times, will ya?" With the Corvette, GM saw the car perform less than desired, thought they may be able to improve the performance on rough tracks with a new damper setting so they developed it and are going to offer it to everyone who owns the car. Everyone can repeat those results (assuming they have the skill) whenever and wherever they want, as opposed to only a group of automotive journalists with the manufacturer's suspension engineers at their disposal. The two are far from comparable.

Yup.

[kevm14]

So because 93 octane is not available in CA, M/T added octane boost to their 91 to get it to 93 in the GT-R. Apparently because they say the Z06 says 91 or better, they stuck with 91, even though I am sure performance improves with 93. So that's something. Given the Z06's propensity to run warm and then pull timing, the extra octane would likely have made a difference.