Imagine Target trumping Saks Fifth Avenue. Timex outshining Rolex. Chevy beating Lamborghini.

Actually, that last one should come as no surprise. The Chevrolet Corvette has added to its status as the world’s most affordable supercar as it emerged the king of the 2015 Car and Driver Lightning Lap competition at Virginia International Raceway. It outran such thoroughbreds as the $353,115 McLaren 650S Spider, $274,120 Lamborghini Huracan and $163,000 Porsche 911 GT3.

So quick was the $100,245 Z06 — Corvette’s 650-horsepower performance model — that in the nine-year history of the famed Lightning Lap only one car has ever recorded a faster time: the 2014 Porsche 918 hybrid, a carbon-fiber cyborg from the future that costs nearly nine times as much the Corvette. The $875,175 Porsche was faster by a mere 1.5 seconds. That’s over $250,000 per half second.

The Corvette’s performance left Car and Driver Editor-in-chief Eddie Alterman in awe.

“It’s incredible how much performance [...]

It is with a very heavy heart that we are reporting that Corvette racing legend and friend “Mr. Corvette” Dick Guldstrand has passed away.

Few people were as inexorably linked to the Corvette as Santa Monica, California-born street racer Dick Guldstrand. Like many gearheads growing up in the ’50s, he was enamored with Chevy’s fiberglass two-seater. Unlike most, however, he parlayed his interest and skill behind the wheel into a career worthy of a screenplay.

Turning lessons learned on the track racing Corvettes, Guldstrand launched his own engineering firm in 1968 on California’s (in)famous Thunder Alley, constructing race cars and building hot street machines. For the ’84 C4 Corvette, Chevrolet adopted a rear suspension very much like his advanced five-link system. In 1985, he introduced his own tunerized Corvette, called the GS 80, a C4 packing all the Guldstrand tweaks and a 375-horsepower Traco small-block. [...]

By Saturday morning (August 29th), the Carlisle Fairgrounds were packed from wall to wall for another year of Corvettes at Carlisle. It was literally overwhelming. Walk thirty paces and you find yourself a midst a sea of Corvettes, with no clue from whence you came. Letting this Corvette heaven wash over you, the beauty of similarity is apparent.

It is a celebration of the greatest American sports car, and everything right in the world. Raucous V-8 power. Finely tuned suspension. But alas, amidst all of familiarity there are certainly some standouts. While many are good at blending in, others can’t help but grab your attention. Here are some of the most outrageous things we [...]

General Motors Supercharged 6.2-liter V-8 | Cadillac CTS-V, Chevrolet Corvette Z06

It’s tough not to love any engine that produces 650 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque, especially when its brute force is delivered linearly, predictably, and with the classic Chevy small-block V-8 rumble. And we definitely love the Chevrolet Corvette Z06’s supercharged LT4 V-8, which GM says is among the very lightest and most compact engines capable of such prodigious output. Displacing the same 6.2 liters as the naturally aspirated fifth-generation small-block V-8 that powers regular Corvette Stingray models (more details on that engine here), the LT4 runs a maximum boost of 9.4 psi to produce as much as 200 more horsepower. (Fun fact: The LT4’s Eaton supercharger stuffs four lobes into a 1.74-liter blower.)

The engine’s overall dimensions are barely larger than those of the nonsupercharged Chevy V-8—the blower adds less than one [...]