My Corvette Moment? When I Took the Mighty ZR1 All the Way to 200 MPH

It’s fitting the C8 Corvette graces the cover of the 70th anniversary print issue of MotorTrend magazine (get the September 2019 on newsstands beginning August 2). We’ve grown up together, you see.

“We wanted a magazine that would interest the foreign car exponent, the sports car enthusiast, the custom car fan, and also be equally interesting to the stock car owner,” original MotorTrend editor-in-chief Walt Woron wrote as he put the finishing touches on the September 1949 issue. “A magazine that brings you the trends of the automotive field: designs of the future, what’s new in motoring, news from the Continent, trends in design.”

MotorTrend founder Robert Petersen’s personal connection with Southern California race car builder Frank Kurtis perhaps explains why he chose the Kurtis Sport Car as the first cover car for his new magazine—rather than, say, a Chevrolet sedan, America’s top-selling car that year. But the choice was also an eerily prescient confirmation of MotorTrend‘s mission statement.

Within two years of the Kurtis appearing on our cover, a senior GM executive in Detroit had instigated a secret backroom program code-named Project Opel, a proposal for a fiberglass-bodied sports car that, like the Kurtis, used many regular production car components under its shapely skin. The GM exec’s name? Harley Earl. And the car? Well, it first came to the public’s attention as the EX-122, one of the stars of GM’s 1953 Motorama Show at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel. But you know it better as the original Chevrolet Corvette.

Frank Kurtis had the idea. GM had the money.

Today MotorTrend is more than just a magazine. It’s a video on demand service, linear TV channels, a website, and a social media phenomenon—an automotive content creator and curator with an audience that now spans the globe. MotorTrend has grown up. So, too, has the Chevrolet Corvette. The C8 is still America’s Own Sports Car, but with its mid-engine layout, it’s built to take on all comers, from Italy’s Ferrari to Britain’s McLaren and Germany’s Porsche.

I can’t wait to drive it.

Although I’d had brief stints in C3s, C4s, and C5s over the years, I arrived in the U.S. to become editor-in-chief of MotorTrend just after the C6 launched in 2004. Since then, I’ve done a lot of miles in Corvettes. Like all great sports cars, the very best Corvettes bring even the most mundane drives to life. And the special drives … well, they’re something else again.

July 2011. The afternoon traffic on the A9 autobahn in southern Germany is unusually light. Le Mans champ and MotorTrend presenter Justin Bell is lounging in the passenger seat as I let the Corvette ZR1 off the leash. For 25 glorious minutes we own the fast lane, the speedo needle never falling below 120 mph and occasionally flickering past 180 mph when I can read the traffic in the far distance.

We cover 55 miles in those 25 minutes, an average speed of 132 mph, the 638-hp V-8 leaving a thundering sonic boom in its wake, scattering slower Benzes and BMWs and Audis like autumn leaves. We roll 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.

It got even better the next day, filming an episode of Epic Drives for the MotorTrend Channel on YouTube.

I punched the gas as the traffic cleared, shifting into fifth at 160 mph and sixth at somewhere north of 180 mph. And then, with Justin watching the speedo and counting off the increments, almost shouting to be heard over the shrieking wall-of-sound snarl from the supercharged small-block, I took the mighty ZR1 all the way to 200 mph.

That is my all-time best Corvette Moment, for now. I suspect the C8 is going to provide some better ones in the coming years. And just as we have done for the past 70 years, MotorTrend will take you along for the ride.

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