Auto News 5

In 1984, when gasoline was suddenly cheap again following the 1970s fuel crises, Pontiac's slogan was, "We Build Excitement."

Automobile Magazine's annual All-Stars test inevitably features a few predictable outcomes. For instance, I fully expected the Chevy Corvette ZR1 to rip my face off, and indeed I am now faceless. And I wasn't even driving it at the time. I was in the Jaguar XF, following executive editor Joe DeMatio, who floored the throttle and nearly triggered the Jag's air bags with the concussive boom of the ZR1's exhaust.

I'll be damned if I'm going to waste precious space trying to explain to anyone who doesn't get it, why we think America's precious Detroit-based manufacturing assets deserve a hand in the form of loans from the government. Why we think that Congress is full of self-righteous poseurs with double standards, hidden agendas, and heavily subsidized foreign automakers building cars in their (Southern, nonunion) home states.

At their facility in New Hudson, Michigan, Pratt & Miller (the engineering team behind the AMLS Corvette program) introduced eco-friendly editions of their famed C6R and C6RS Chevrolet Corvettes. Jumping on the green bandwagon, the new models are smaller and lighter than the company's current race and street editions.

Corvette ZR1 rage is spreading with viral intensity. Montana collector Dave Ressler bid a million bucks at a charity auction to own the first production ZR1. A Chevrolet dealer in Texas allegedly charged $400,000 apiece for two such Corvettes. After British journalists blitzed the Bonneville Salt Flats in one ZR1, German writers raced another press car around a 7.8-mile circular track near Nardo, Italy.

The ZR1 is a high-water mark for Corvette performance that - given the macro trends in oil prices, the U.S. economy, and the fortunes of General Motors - almost certainly will never be achieved again.

As the phrase "tuned at the legendary Nürburgring" has found its way into ad copy for more and more performance cars, lap times at the Nürburgring Nordschleife racetrack have become the newest measure of performance, taking their place alongside top speed, quarter-mile, and 0-to-60-mph times. Most recently Chrysler, which had not done any development work at the track, took a 2009 Dodge Viper SRT10 ACR to the 'Ring, seeking to beat the time set only a couple months before by the new Chevrolet Corvette ZR1. "One of the big driving factors for us going," said SRT engineer Mike Shinedling, "was that we got so many letters and e-mails from Viper owners." The result? The Viper ACR's time beat the ZR1's, and Viper owners everywhere have a new bar boast. There's no official sanctioning body for Nürburgring lap times, but figures for some recent production cars are listed to the right, as reported by their manufacturers.

In the 1950s, most Detroit cars got an annual face-lift, with big sellers getting all-new body shells every two or three years. Low-volume cars like the Chevrolet Corvette didn't justify big investment, but since fiberglass was cheap to tool, General Motors intended to change Corvettes every year to demonstrate the potential for plastic body panels on mainstream cars. The original Corvette design lasted three years, but the 1956 face-lift was supposed to be good for only one. In 1955, it fell to me to stick four headlights on the C1 front end for 1957, while simultaneously working on the C2, due in '58 with its new shorter-wheelbase, V-8-only chassis.