55 Miles In a Corvette ZR1 At An Average of 132 MPH – On The Road
Tuesday, August 9, 2011 by admin
“The sun shone, and we had a good speed.” That was how an Australian racing driver mate of mine used to sum up a memorable day out in a fast car. TV host, racer and MT contributor Justin Bell and I had to schlep a Corvette ZR1 from London to Munich the other week – a 750-mile jaunt that included a 30min train ride under the English Channel. The sun shone and we had a good speed. A very good speed. The best I’ve had in almost 20 years, in fact.
Back in 1991 I drove an Opel Lotus Omega for a couple of days in Germany. It was quite a car. Based on the GM2300-platform Opel Omega – a kissing cousin of the Holden Commodore of the time aimed at mildly prosperous Germans who wanted a big car but couldn’t afford the coin for a Mercedes – it was the psychotic offspring of GM’s hook-up with British sports car maker Lotus in 1986. The Lotus Omega looked like a low-rent Pep Boys special – all fat tires, flares, and stuck-on spoilers. But it was, at the time, the fastest production four door sedan in the world. Faster than BMW’s M5, the hand-built Mercedes-Benz 500E, and Australia’s Holden Commodore Group A SS.
The Lotus Omega would hit a genuine 176mph, and it would get there in one helluva rush. The 0-60 sprint took 5.2 seconds, with 100mph coming up in 11.2seconds. It would easily spin the rear wheels on a damp road in fourth gear – no traction control back then. Imagine a Chevy Caprice that could frighten a Ferrari Testarossa. That’s what this thing was like. Scary, ridiculous, omigod, laugh-out-loud fast.
Lotus had stroked the GM 3.0-liter straight six that powered top-of-the-range Omegas (most had 2.0-liter GM Family Two four bangers under the hood) to 3.6-liters and added a pair of Garrett T25 turbochargers. Power was boosted to 377hp at 5200rpm, and torque to 419lb-ft at 4200 rpm. All that grunt was channeled to the rear wheels via the same ZF six-speed manual transmission used in the 1990 Corvette ZR1 and Lotus engineers spent a lot of time engineering an independent rear end stout enough to cope, as well as adding AP Racing brakes all round, along with revised springs and shocks.
Early one morning, on the deserted A81 autobahn between Heilbronn and Wurzburg, I covered 53 miles in 24 minutes in the Lotus Omega; an average speed of 132mph. For almost 20 years that epic run has remained a personal best. And with the huge increases in traffic on Germany’s autobahn network since then, combined with the creeping advance of speed limits (about half the autobahn is now subject to speed limits), it’s one I never expected to match. Especially on the A9 autobahn between Nuremburg and Munich.
This is one of Germany’s busier autobahns, funneling traffic from the north of the country past the home towns of Audi and BMW, and on to major highways leading into Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Hungary. It’s wide – three lanes each way – and open, but much of it is subject to variable speed limits that reduce traffic to 80mph or less when the road is heavily congested. As it frequently is.
But the Monday evening traffic was light, and I was able to give the Corvette its head. For 25 glorious minutes we hammered down the fast lane on the A9, the needle on the metric speedo of the European-spec ZR1 never falling below the 200km/h mark (about 120mph) and occasionally flickering past 300km/h (187mph) when I could read the traffic in the far distance; the 638-hp supercharged V-8 leaving a thundering sonic boom in its wake. The slightly nervous, squirrely feeling through the steering I’d noticed from the super-grippy Michelin Pilot Sport Cup tires at lesser cruising speeds disappeared as the aerodynamics kicked in; it was almost as if a giant invisible hand was gently pressing the car into the tarmac, steadying it. And the power! Take it from me, there are very few cars on the planet that will accelerate from 160mph to almost 190mph with the urgency of the ZR1.
That old Lotus Omega was a white knuckle ride above 160 mph – I can still remember sensing the body flexing through hyper-fast sweepers, and how the damned thing shook its head violently when I hit an expansion joint on a bridge at 170mph and all the air rushed in under the front spoiler. The ZR1, by contrast, felt composed and confident all the way up to almost 190mph, like a car whose demeanor had been honed on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans. Former Viper and Corvette racer Bell, a man more used to driving at warp speed than sitting in the passenger seat watching the scenery flash by, didn’t seem unduly concerned by the pace, and he wasn’t just being polite.
We covered 55 miles in those 25 minutes, which meant we’d averaged 132 mph, equaling the record I’d set in the Lotus Omega all though years ago, and without the white knuckles and sweaty palms. We rolled into the Munich evening traffic grinning from ear to ear at the sheer audacity of it all; at the idea that even in this era of speed cameras, fuel-sipping hybrids and computer-controlled cars that do most of the driving themselves, you can still drive a supercar at supercar speeds on a public road. Germany’s autobahns are truly one of the seven wonders of the automotive world.
I called Mrs MacKenzie in London from the hotel later that night. “How was your day?” she asked.
“Oh, the sun shone, and we had a good speed.”
Back in 1991 I drove an Opel Lotus Omega for a couple of days in Germany. It was quite a car. Based on the GM2300-platform Opel Omega – a kissing cousin of the Holden Commodore of the time aimed at mildly prosperous Germans who wanted a big car but couldn’t afford the coin for a Mercedes – it was the psychotic offspring of GM’s hook-up with British sports car maker Lotus in 1986. The Lotus Omega looked like a low-rent Pep Boys special – all fat tires, flares, and stuck-on spoilers. But it was, at the time, the fastest production four door sedan in the world. Faster than BMW’s M5, the hand-built Mercedes-Benz 500E, and Australia’s Holden Commodore Group A SS.
Lotus had stroked the GM 3.0-liter straight six that powered top-of-the-range Omegas (most had 2.0-liter GM Family Two four bangers under the hood) to 3.6-liters and added a pair of Garrett T25 turbochargers. Power was boosted to 377hp at 5200rpm, and torque to 419lb-ft at 4200 rpm. All that grunt was channeled to the rear wheels via the same ZF six-speed manual transmission used in the 1990 Corvette ZR1 and Lotus engineers spent a lot of time engineering an independent rear end stout enough to cope, as well as adding AP Racing brakes all round, along with revised springs and shocks.
Early one morning, on the deserted A81 autobahn between Heilbronn and Wurzburg, I covered 53 miles in 24 minutes in the Lotus Omega; an average speed of 132mph. For almost 20 years that epic run has remained a personal best. And with the huge increases in traffic on Germany’s autobahn network since then, combined with the creeping advance of speed limits (about half the autobahn is now subject to speed limits), it’s one I never expected to match. Especially on the A9 autobahn between Nuremburg and Munich.
This is one of Germany’s busier autobahns, funneling traffic from the north of the country past the home towns of Audi and BMW, and on to major highways leading into Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Hungary. It’s wide – three lanes each way – and open, but much of it is subject to variable speed limits that reduce traffic to 80mph or less when the road is heavily congested. As it frequently is.
But the Monday evening traffic was light, and I was able to give the Corvette its head. For 25 glorious minutes we hammered down the fast lane on the A9, the needle on the metric speedo of the European-spec ZR1 never falling below the 200km/h mark (about 120mph) and occasionally flickering past 300km/h (187mph) when I could read the traffic in the far distance; the 638-hp supercharged V-8 leaving a thundering sonic boom in its wake. The slightly nervous, squirrely feeling through the steering I’d noticed from the super-grippy Michelin Pilot Sport Cup tires at lesser cruising speeds disappeared as the aerodynamics kicked in; it was almost as if a giant invisible hand was gently pressing the car into the tarmac, steadying it. And the power! Take it from me, there are very few cars on the planet that will accelerate from 160mph to almost 190mph with the urgency of the ZR1.
That old Lotus Omega was a white knuckle ride above 160 mph – I can still remember sensing the body flexing through hyper-fast sweepers, and how the damned thing shook its head violently when I hit an expansion joint on a bridge at 170mph and all the air rushed in under the front spoiler. The ZR1, by contrast, felt composed and confident all the way up to almost 190mph, like a car whose demeanor had been honed on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans. Former Viper and Corvette racer Bell, a man more used to driving at warp speed than sitting in the passenger seat watching the scenery flash by, didn’t seem unduly concerned by the pace, and he wasn’t just being polite.
We covered 55 miles in those 25 minutes, which meant we’d averaged 132 mph, equaling the record I’d set in the Lotus Omega all though years ago, and without the white knuckles and sweaty palms. We rolled into the Munich evening traffic grinning from ear to ear at the sheer audacity of it all; at the idea that even in this era of speed cameras, fuel-sipping hybrids and computer-controlled cars that do most of the driving themselves, you can still drive a supercar at supercar speeds on a public road. Germany’s autobahns are truly one of the seven wonders of the automotive world.
I called Mrs MacKenzie in London from the hotel later that night. “How was your day?” she asked.
“Oh, the sun shone, and we had a good speed.”
