The rocket scientist’s ride

The original American astronauts were celebrities who drove Corvettes. Today’s astronauts are just about as anonymous as accountants, and no one really notices what they drive.

Time passes. Astronauts and their machines surrender some stardust. But with the Corvette’s seventh generation, reaching dealers as a 2014 model, Chevrolet is making a hard push to recapture an era when a Corvette was every space cowboy’s dream car. The 2014 model is not only sculpted to recall those days, but also wears a name dating to the landmark 1963 model: Stingray.
Sliding behind the wheel of the seventh-generation car, known in series as the C7, the contours of the front fenders frame the view ahead. It’s a decidedly throwback sensation, if not quite the one-to-one evocation of the pontoon fenders of ‘60s sports racers. Close enough, though, to slake the nostalgist’s thirst – a thirst that runs particularly deep among Corvette fans.

Pressing the starter button awakens the 6.2-litre small-block V8 engine, a piece of equipment with roots stretching to  1955. In its latest incarnation, the engine incorporates direct fuel injection, a change that necessitated a complete revamp of the unit’s cylinder-head design, with intake and exhaust ports swapping places to ensure proper airflow and fuel mixing – this, according to John Rydzewski, assistant chief engineer for the engine.
Rydzewski frames the Corvette’s myriad capabilities in terms of bandwidth – a term with roots among the horn-rimmed set in the astronauts’ mission control. Translated to the C7 Corvette, the term encapsulates the car’s eminent suitability to daily driving or fevered racetrack laps.

The engine’s 455 horsepower (460hp with the tested optional dual-mode exhaust) are converted into pleasing burbles and snorts, the volume of which being adjustable via the console-mounted driver mode selector. The rotary knob dials in up to a dozen parameters, including the electronic limited slip differential, power steering, throttle, automatic transmission, shock absorbers, traction control and mufflers.
The Stingray’s engine doesn’t just sound fabulous, it also propels the car with suitable authority thanks to an additional 50lb-ft of low-rpm torque compared to the outgoing Corvette. With two adults aboard, no burnouts to warm the tires and the iffy grip of a random empty stretch of asphalt, an impromptu run from zero to 60mph produced a 4.5-second time on the dashboard display. Chevy says the Stingray will make the sprint in 3.8 seconds under optimal conditions.
Want to expand the base Corvette’s performance? Choose the $2,800 Z51 performance package, with its track-ready gears and engine oil system, bigger brakes and improved shocks. Some of these components
At the other end of the spectrum is the eye-poppingly expensive $8,005 3LT leather interior package, which – heavens – doesn’t even include the suede headliner, an additional $995. That is a $9,000 outlay to create the plush cockpit that premium sports-car buyers demand. Yet Chevy recognises the breadth of the Corvette cult, which includes luxury-aspiring Sunday drivers and track rats alike. Together, the Z51 and 3LT represent opposite ends of Corvette bandwidth, if you will.
But in a Corvette, you don’t have to make a King Solomon-calibre decision. If you have the money, you can have both.

could cost $2,800 themselves on the aftermarket, so the Z51 package represents an amazing bargain.

You must, however, choose between the seven-speed manual transmission and the conventional six-speed automatic. The gate pattern of the seven-speed unit is a bit crowded, but the shifter is precise enough that missed shifts never arise. Drivers can choose to use a rev-matching feature, whereby the car automatically blips the throttle to allow better meshing between gears, or you can leave that feature off and do it yourself.
The six-speed automatic lacks the two additional forward gears that are quickly becoming de rigueur among performance and luxury cars, but with the small-block’s prodigious torque, six gears feel like plenty. More importantly, drivers can shift the automatic manually with steering wheel-mounted paddles.

Chevy has made the effort to program the automatic to mimic a manual in its behaviour, even giving the engine a touch of rev-matching throttle on downshifts. And unlike the manual mode on the new Jaguar F-Type, which reserves the right to make ill-timed mid-corner downshifts that upset the car’s line exiting a turn, the Corvette’s manual mode is truly manual.
In fact, the Corvette is so intelligent that when driven hard towards a corner in full automatic mode, the car bangs off downshifts as the driver brakes. “Great automatic”, incidentally, is not heard very often among sports-car enthusiasts – particularly where an American sports car is concerned – but it is richly deserved here.
So is the Corvette too smart for its own good? Hardly. The visceral thrills and rawness are still there in abundance. It just now takes a bit of mission-control know-how to tap them.

Vuhl is getting real

In Mexico City, brothers Iker and Guillermo Echeverria are about to build a truly global

supercar. The pair unveiled the windscreen-less Vuhl 05 – described as a track-ready but road-legal lightweight supercar  – to rousing approval at the2013 Goodwood Festival of Speed in West Sussex, England. The car’s debut, which included a blast up Lord March’s driveway with Mexican Formula 1 rookie Esteban Gutierrez behind the wheel, helped the secure 20 solid orders, sufficient to give the car the green light for production. The name Vuhl (pronounced VOOL), is an acronym for the grammatically questionable Vehicles of Ultra-lightweight and High-performance.

“We could not have wished for a better response from the media and public alike,” said Guillermo Echeverria in a statement. “As hoped, it is clear the car is just as appealing to those wanting an ultra-cool car for the road as the serious track-day enthusiasts seeking an alternative to the offerings of more established manufacturers.”

Styled by the Echeverrias’ own design house, the two-seat 05 will wear bodies of fibreglass or, optionally, carbon fibre composite, crafted in Canada. Fabrication of the bonded aluminium chassis, and final assembly
of the car itself, will happen in Mexico City, abetted by a global array of suppliers that includes OZ, Michelin, Bilstein, Hella, Sparco and Wilwood. A Ford-sourced turbocharged 2-litre four-cylinder engine produces a stout 285 horsepower – sufficient to propel the 1600lb roadster to 62mph in 3.7 seconds and keep the speedometer needle moving all the way to 152mph.

The company, backed by a cadre of private investors and the Mexican government, is expected to start building the 05 “Edition One” in November. In the UK, the car will command £56,800 and in the US, $89,000. Initial availability will be limited to the UK and US, but the Echeverrias plan to expand deliveries to continental Europe, the Middle East and China.

A low-speed spin in Jaguar's Project 7 concept

At the end of the evening at Traps in Spanish Bay, I turned to my companions and said, “I should get to bed. I've gotta get up in the morning to go drive the Project 7.”
“What's that again?”
“It's that Jag F-Type with the D-Type cues and the FIA stripe; the car that validates Rong's Miata.”
The next morning, I drove out to the gated community built around the Pasadera Country Club -- a forceful stone's throw from Laguna Seca -- for a stint behind the wheel. Unlike some of my more fortunate colleagues, I hadn't yet sampled Jag's latest roadster, which meant that the Project 7 would be my driving introduction to the F-Type, as well.
The concept had been fitted with a passenger seat since it was displayed at Goodwood earlier in the summer. After all, it wouldn't do to allow your 550-hp concept car to be tossed around by ham-handed journalists without some adult supervision.
The P7 isn't wildly different from the production F-Type, save for some carbon-fiber bodywork, a cut-down acrylic windshield and that driver's side fairing meant to instantly evoke the D-Types that won Le Mans in 1955, '56 and '57. The paint recalls the Flag blue-and-white color scheme of Ecurie Ecosse, the famed Scottish racing organization who aced the '56 and '57 outings at La Sarthe. The Jaguar-branded Pirellis are an unabashedly rad touch; combining old-time white lines with the boldness of the Idlers-stenciled meats Nakai-san fits to his Rauh-Welt Porsches.
There's certainly something cool about the Project 7, but all the folderol makes it seem like it's perhaps trying a bittoo hard to be something it isn't. The Fifties racer that spawned the roadgoing XKSS was impossibly low and relentlessly curvaceous, one of the most organic and lovely racing machines ever constructed.
The F-Type, while a looker in its own right, is a completely different beast. It's a nasty, brutish and short hoodlum wrapped in a Savile Row suit and sent off to Henry Higgins for elocution lessons. "The bloventry in Coventry stays mainly on the doventry." Or something.
It's fantastic just as it sits, and I'm not exactly sure the additions do it any aesthetic favors. That said, any wackiness inherent in the P7's design is of a sinister sort; it's more Great Milenko than Bozo.
Situated in the right seat, the 5.0L 550-hp supercharged AJ V8 -- an engine that stands as one of my favorite powerplants in any configuration -- burbles and bubbles at idle. It's a bit loud, perhaps, but it could be chalked up to the open configuration. In the interest of weight savings and raciness, the convertible top's been completely removed. Drive it in the rain and you'll be a sopping jockey. If you're unwilling to get wet, you'll never be Mike Hawthorn. This car wants you to be Mike Hawthorn.
Relegated to the residential private roads around Pasadera, I plodded along, stabbing the throttle here and there. “Ho dag!” -- a colloquialism I'm often wont to employ on Twtitter -- was pretty much all that came to mind upon each application of the loud pedal. This was the F-Type V8 S exhaust as Sir William Lyons intended. Unfortunately, the Yankee Federales and Her Majesty's Ministry of Excessively Noisy Items deem it unseemly and unsavory.
Unseemly, I can accept, but the sounds are nothing but savory. The Project 7 is lovely at low speed for the same reason the Boss 302 is such a happy-making thing to plod around in. One can play around at or below the speed limit, swapping cogs on a whim, revving the mill in great, glorious glissandos of snarl, snap, crack, whack and gurgle.
If Jaguar doesn't offer the system as an off-the-shelf, “off-highway only” unit (wink, nudge), somebody needs to replicate it. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next week, but certainly, the sooner the better.
Due to the low speeds involved, I can't comment on the car's handling with any authority, but it seemed nicely sorted and I'm generally pretty partial to the way Jag sets its cars up these days. At one point, in third gear at about 35, I quickly rolled about a third of the way into the throttle and the rear end started to waggle under the power. Note that traction control was enabled. I've yet to drive the C7, but the P7 offered everything I want out of a modern Corvette. And hey, Corvettes have a pretty stellar record at Le Mans, too.
If driving the Project 7 did anything for me besides offer the thrill of putting around in a factory one-off, it made me anxious for the F-Type RS roadster that's almost certain to roll out of Castle Bromwich at some point down the line. It'll be nothing if not an open-topped hellion. And if they can figure out a way to sneak this exhaust system past the regulators, it's sure to be a heavenly little monster.