The C5 is beautifully balanced, surprisingly comfortable, and is built to a far higher standard than any Corvette in history. The C5 handles great on a road course, but still reminds us of a muscle car when cruising along or accelerating down a straight stretch. The Corvette is a beast.
The standard Corvette engine, the LS1 V8, is potent. Stand on the throttle and it's fast traffic. It produces 350 horsepower and 375 pound-feet of torque with the six-speed manual transmission, and 360 pound-feet with the automatic.
The Corvette is quick out of the gate, whether equipped with the automatic or manual. While we prefer the six-speed, we have to admit that the automatic rams its shifts home with authority, and there's enough muscle in the LS1 V8 to cover the performance penalties associated with auto-shifters. Miss one shift with the manual and the automatic in the lane next door will clean your clock. The automatic does not have a manual-shift mode, but it doesn't need one.
Unlike most ragtops, the Corvette convertible weighs about the same as the coupe, so its acceleration is undiluted: 0-to-60 mph in less than 5 seconds with the six-speed manual transmission, about 0.4 seconds slower with the automatic. The only performance penalty that goes with the convertible version is top speed. The ragtop doesn't share the coupe's aerodynamic efficiency, so it tops out at a mere 162 mph versus 175 mph for the coupe. Put the top down and there's even more drag and a correspondingly lower top speed. Still, that kind of speed will get you to the drive-in in a pretty big hurry, and in the local slammer even faster.
Ride quality is decidedly stiff. You don't get a sports car's ability to change directions without snubbing body roll and limiting up-and-down suspension motions, and when you do those things you're obliged to accept some tradeoff in comfort. Potholes are easily identifiable in the Corvette. The Corvette shutters over bumps, yet they are not uncomfortably harsh. You hear them and feel them, but they aren't jarring, and they don't unduly upset the handling balance. Handling is not as precise as a Porsche or BMW, there's a bit of a dead spot in the steering, but it's much less of a hammer than a Viper. The Corvette offers sharp reflexes on rural roads. It provides a superb blend of muscle and finesse, with a high tolerance for mistakes of the enthusiastic variety. Its brakes are nothing short of race-worthy.
There aren't any significant performance distinctions between the coupe and convertible. Chevrolet claims that the structural design for the C5 began with the convertible, and as a consequence no shoring-up measures were required for the soft-top chassis. You hear the same song from almost every purveyor of convertibles, but in this application it seems to be true. Significantly, we didn't see a hint of cowl shake, the time-honored malady of convertibles (wherein the dashboard and the outside of the car oscillate at different rates). If there is any distinction to be made between the agility and stability of the Corvette coupe and convertible, it would be all but impossible to discern on public roads.
Active Handling, which comes standard, gets you out of slides before trouble strikes by applying braking to the individual corners as needed. It uses on-board sensors to measure yaw, lateral acceleration and steering wheel position, and uses ABS and traction control to correct oversteer or understeer. Corvette engineers calibrated the system to limit intrusiveness, however. Aside from an Active Handling message on the instrument panel, drivers might not always realize they've been assisted.
The Z06 is an absolute joy to drive fast. We found it rock-steady, precise, consistent, and fast at a smooth 2.2-mile road course near Las Vegas. The brakes didn't fade. The transmission and shift linkage were solid and tight, shifting perfectly each time, whether up or down. The handling is balanced: The Corvette didn't understeer unless the driver forced it to. It only oversteered in response to deliberately crude throttle application, and then the Active Handling brought it back into line by applying the brakes to the outside front wheel.
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