Yahoo Autos A Heretic in the Corvette Chapel
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From the December 2021 issue of Car and Driver.
The Beliefs
The Devil's Triangle is a diabolically winding loop in East Tennessee favored for hairpin turns, leafy scenery, and the tantalizing ever-present danger of flying off the road at speed. It has ecstatic terrain and interesting history in its corner. I had a 2021 Corvette Stingray with the Z51 Performance package and a friend who suggested we head north from Georgia and see what the car and "the coal road," as he called it, were made of.
I am not a card-carrying member of the Corvette cult and never have been. The Corvette is the car of people I am not. When I was young, Corvettes belonged to guys named Todd, freshly divorced dentists, and country singers with awe-inspiring substance-abuse issues.
I am none of these. I grew up watching what I thought real speed was: rally cars flying off Corsican cliffs, NASCAR machines roaring at Talladega, and Ayrton Senna ripping up Monaco in a McLaren. I loved either speed or danger in my cars, the cheaper the better. A Mazdaspeed 3 torque-steering off the road or a derelict Volkswagen Thing moving any faster than 35 mph fit my needs perfectly. Nothing pleased or still pleases me more than cheap thrills in rally frames and eccentric rattletraps seconds away from falling to ribbons.
The Corvette seemed to be a kind of mostly cosmetic speed machine enjoyed by the mostly cosmetic. Give me something focused less on aesthetics and more on beating skulls on straightaways. (That car would be an '87 Grand National, the looks-don't-matter hero of my youth.)
Also, I spend most of my working hours considering college football, the sort of thing that can immunize one to elegies for the everlasting American spirit, be they aimed at storied universities or storied automotive brands.
So maybe I am the wrong person to drive a Corvette, or the right one, because the car C/D sent wasn't the Corvette I remembered, the kind the neighborhood dads would wreck two weeks after bringing them home. The car deposited at my house in Atlanta was a 495-hp C8, the mid-engine Vette that GM built to deliver exotic performance at American middle-manager pricing.
General Motors dropped it into a mire of historical circumstances it could not control. The C8 debuted, and in short order a UAW strike, a global pandemic, a subsequent economic recession, and a chip shortage made the cars harder to find than GM probably would have liked. But the ones who found them loved them. It was an unfair entry into the world for a mid-engine move that had been teased for decades. But what is fair? Fair describes a breeze. The C8 looks more like a cyclone someone equipped with exactly two cupholders.
The Road
The state of Tennessee built its meanest prison in the Devil's Triangle for the same reason the road could pass for a licensing exam for the amateur aspiring rally driver. It sits on the Cumberland Plateau in a crimped piece of geography known for two things:
