Last month Chevrolet catapulted the Camaro into supercar territory with a single lap around the Nurburgring. While everyone was chanting ‘Murica,’ some may have been wondering why it was the Camaro breaking records and not the Corvette. Well, that’s because they were prepping their 2018 Z06 to make its appearance, once again with a standard manual transmission.
7-minutes and 16-seconds is all the Camaro ZL1 1LE needed to work its way around the ‘Green Hell.’ Yet the 2018 Corvette Z06 was able to best that by just over 2 seconds, making it the second fastest car with a manual gearbox to lap the famed track. It also puts the new Z06 just behind the 2018 Porsche GT3 by a meager 1.2-seconds. It also puts the Z06 in arms reach of the Dodge’s track animal, the SRT-10 ACR. That’s actually quite impressive when you consider how civilized the Z06 is in comparison.
As it stands from the Nurburgrings website, the Z06 will find a nice home in 12th place all time. That list shrinks to a degree when you factor out all the non-street legal cars. Once you ditch the Nio EP9, and both the Radicals, the Z06 finds itself inside the top ten. Not only that, it happens to be the cheapest car in the top ten by a substantial margin.
Now one of the most interesting things to note is that the Z06 still used a standard manual transmission to record its time of 7-minutes and 13.9-seconds. The question on everyone’s mind is how fast could the mighty American go if it had one of those flappy paddle gearboxes. It is entirely possible that the 8-speed automatic could help the Z06 trim a little more fat from that lap time. It would be even more beneficial if Chevrolet enlisted their own in house secret weapon, Jim Mero. With his experience and the different transmission, it’s entirely possible that the 2018 Z06 could get under the 7-minute and 10-second range. Considering that is where the new Mercedes-AMG GT-R just landed, I wouldn’t say its completely out of the question.
All speculation aside it’s nice to see America’s premier performance car still on top in some form or another. It was exciting to see the $70k Camaro keep up with supercars, but it’s even more exciting seeing the Corvette proving what we have known all along. That it is truly one of the best sports cars in all the world.
