Space-ready materials, race-tuned dynamics—meet the most credible Corvette yet

The Corvette has many identities. It has long been America’s homegrown sports car. And over the decades, Corvettes have variously been boulevard cruisers, track-focused animals, even mid-life crisis mobiles. But perhaps most often, these vehicles are highway eye candy, the envy of many thrill seekers.

Corvette has not reached its current status on gear appeal alone, however. The unseen ingredient to its success has been technology, and the 2014 Corvette Stingray is simply the latest in a long line of vehicles that quietly thrive off clever innovations while looks and speed grab most of the attention. Now, this seventh-generation Corvette is a looker, but it’s also—by quite a margin—the most versatile sports car to wear the name. There’s never been a ‘vette quite like this, thanks to the C7’s liberal use of clever upgrades throughout: lightweight materials more common to the aerospace industry; clever electronics controlling the engine, drivetrain, and so on. Over the summer we spent a week with one to see how it all works and ask what the fuss was about. The answer? This is the most credible Corvette yet.

A brief (three graphs!) history

The first Corvettes took to the streets in 1953, and even then the car was known for some innovation. The initial Corvettes used glass fiber reinforced plastic body panels, something of a novelty in the 1950s. But these vehicles were powered by a rather anemic six cylinder engine coupled to a two-speed automatic transmission—they were neither particularly quick, nor that popular.

Things started to change in 1955 when a General Motors engineer by the name of Zora Arkus-Duntov set to work making the car something a bit more potent. Arkus-Duntov replaced the engine with the company’s brand new small-block V8, showcasing the car’s speed at events around the country. The breakthrough came in 1956, when Corvette set a record of 150 mph at the Daytona Beach Speed Trials in Florida. A new Corvette called the Stingray arrived in 1963, and this car was much more advanced than its record-setting predecessors: independent rear suspension (rather than a live axle), disc brakes on all four wheels, and much better handling.

Various iterations followed over the years. Success at the track boosted sales, as did an association with the space race (Corvettes may as well have been the staff car for the astronaut program). By 1997, the fifth-generation Corvette, the C5, was on the scene. The gearbox had moved from behind the engine to in between the rear wheels (called a transaxle gearbox), doing favorable things for the car’s weight distribution. Otherwise the recipe was quite familiar: a powerful V8 up front, a lightweight frame chassis, wrapped in an aerodynamic plastic composite body. The C7 takes the company’s tweaking even further, so let’s take a closer look.

Weather, Eco, Sport (but mostly Sport)

The Corvette Stingray is an extremely good car, moving things forward significantly from the previous generation C6 (2005 to 2013). At its heart is GM’s new 6.2L V8, the LT1. The engine is still a pushrod V8, but that makes it lighter and more compact than a comparable engine with overhead camshafts. Direct injection and variable valve timing help it make 455 bhp and 455 lb-ft, and from idle to 4000 rpm it’s a match for the old 7L LS7 motor. Active fuel management joins the party for efficiency, shutting off fuel to four of the engine’s eight cylinders when cruising (automatically with the eight-speed automatic gearbox, only in Eco mode with the seven-speed manual).

Our test car was supplied with two must-have options. First, the Z51 performance package ($5,000) adds a dry sump to the engine, a performance exhaust, extra cooling, and an electronic limited slip differential. Second, our test cart has switchable magnetic ride dampers ($1,795), active shock absorbers filled with magnetorheological fluid (which can be made more viscous by applying a magnetic current) that adjust their damping every 10 ms. A rotary dial behind the gearstick lets you switch the car between five different modes, altering the Stingray’s behavior with the flick of a wrist.

In Weather and Eco mode, the throttle mapping, steering weight, and traction control settings do their best to keep things sensible. Tour mode keeps the suspension relatively soft (and we do mean relatively) while firming up the steering and throttle response. A valve opens in the performance exhaust above 4,000 rpm, changing the soundtrack from “quiet burble that won’t annoy my neighbors” to “giggle like a child as it barks and the horizon suddenly gets closer.” It sounds like that all the time in Sport mode, which also firms up those dampers, tightens the throttle response a little more, and makes both the traction control and electronic differential more permissive. Track mode is the most focused, least restrained setting.

Cruising in Eco mode, it can be captivating watching an icon on the main display switch from V8 to V4 as cylinder deactivation kicks in, and Weather mode does indeed mean summer thunderstorms aren’t something to fear. But we’ll admit to spending most of our time in Sport. Doing anything else with a bright yellow convertible just seemed wrong.

The seven-speed gearbox isn’t the most tactile we’ve used, which seems a shame now that the clutch pedal is entering its twilight days. Manual gearboxes are giving way to hyper-intelligent automated paddle shifter boxes (dual-clutch and torque converting) that do all the hard work for you. Fewer sports cars of the Stingray’s caliber can be bought with three pedals and a stick these days, and it behooves engineers to make them as good as possible for the remaining enthusiasts.

The manual Stingray does have a flappy paddle of its own behind the steering wheel; this turns on an active rev match system, blipping the throttle automatically as you downshift so the engine is always at the right speed for the gearbox. We’re of two minds about this. Learning how to rev match, or heel-and-toe, is a hard-earned skill borne from practice, and it feels satisfying to do well. Active rev match is damn good at what it does though; it becomes one less thing to think about when driving hard, allowing you to concentrate more fully on your braking and steering. But would overuse become dependence, resulting in an atrophy of skill? We have a nagging suspicion it could.

The adaptive seats will heat and cool you, and they have a wide range of electric adjustment.

Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

The adaptive seats will heat and cool you, and they have a wide range of electric adjustment. Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

Vents and grills, everywhere.

Jonathan Gitlin

Vents and grills, everywhere. Jonathan Gitlin

The adaptive seats will heat and cool you, and they have a wide range of electric adjustment. Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

Vents and grills, everywhere. Jonathan Gitlin

Better guts, less sweat

The C7 looks different, and change is built into the car’s bones not merely its aesthetic. If you’ve seen a racing Corvette recently, it’s easy to be struck by all the grills and scoops that help move air in and out of the vehicle. The newest Stingray has the same effect (particularly if it’s equipped with the Z51 pack). There are cooling vents on the hood and on the quarter, and these help increase downforce—the opposite aerodynamic force to lift—pushing the car down and keeping the tires in as much contact with the road as possible.

The C7 is also a trimmer Corvette. It has a carbon fiber roof and a carbon fiber hood, as Chevrolet shifted the vehicle from steel frames to aluminum ones. Toss in the dry sump system or the rear-car battery, and this lower mass is more evenly distributed as well.

Many of these subtle innovations in the name of efficiency began life on the race track (more on that next week), but the most evident one for drivers and passengers is a lack of sweat. The last C6 could get quite warm. The new Stingray manages heat (much of it coming from the process of making downforce out of hot air exiting the engine bay) much better from our testing. The optional seats fitted to our test car blow cool air through them, just like systems required by certain racing organizations.

The Stingray is almost as good to look at as it is to drive.

Jonathan Gitlin

The Stingray is almost as good to look at as it is to drive. Jonathan Gitlin

Greybeards were sad when the Stingray arrived, and they saw it didn’t have round tail lights.

Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

Greybeards were sad when the Stingray arrived, and they saw it didn’t have round tail lights. Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

LED headlights.

LED headlights.

Greybeards were sad when the Stingray arrived, and they saw it didn’t have round tail lights. Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

LED headlights.

Just imagine one of these could do 30mpg even driven hard.

Jonathan Gitlin

This bee recognized a kindred spirit.

Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

The first Corvette to have an interior you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen in. The (real) carbon fiber trim is lovely.

Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

Thoughts of taking the car camping were shelved once we saw how small the trunk is with the roof down.

Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

The simplest dash setting, with a giant rev counter.

Jonathan Gitlin

Watching real-time fuel economy can help counteract a heavy right foot.

…but oh, those aesthetics

Looks-wise, we believe Chevrolet knocked this one out of the park. The Stingray’s LED headlights and aggressive aerodynamics make it look like few other cars on the road, particularly when it’s Velocity Yellow. It definitely garnered more attention than anything else we’ve driven recently; thumbs up from other drivers were commonplace, as were questions in parking lots or while crawling through traffic. However, the best effect observed was the level of excitement this car aroused in certain segments of the population (driving past the Marine Corps barracks in DC, for example).

The Corvette finally has an interior that doesn’t embarrass the rest of the package. The ergonomics are good, and the bits that you can see and touch don’t feel like they’re ripped from an Aveo. The main instrument panel is now a single, highly configurable TFT display. A second screen lives in the center stack: a touchscreen for the infotainment system. Visibility is good from the driver’s seat, framed as it is by the way the bodywork arches over those 19″ front wheels.

Media connectivity through the infotainment system was solid; there are a decent scattering of USB ports in cubbies, and connecting devices worked the way you’d hope—unremarkably. The on-board navigation software isn’t up to the standard of mobile apps, but it will display directions in the main instrument screen or via the heads-up display. Everything can be controlled by the buttons on the steering wheel, so it’s easy to switch between a real-time fuel economy readout and, say, a graph constantly plotting G-forces (the scale maxes out at 1.25 G). You can even conduct your own GPS-accurate acceleration tests, although perhaps not on public roads, we think.

It’s quite a snug fit in the Corvette, thanks to the extremely wide transmission tunnel between the seats, and we’ve heard that those over six-feet might find it hard to fit at all. The convertible Stingray is also quite light on storage space; a planned camping trip to the Shenandoah National Park turned into a day trip to visit friends camping in the Shenandoah National Park. The trunk is small, and it can get quite hot in there, thanks to waste heat from the transaxle gearbox, despite using aerogel for insulation and the extra cooling that comes with the Z51 pack.

Those are minor complaints, though, and they are quickly forgotten while underway. For other downsides: even at its softest, this car is still stiffly sprung. Together with the low ride height, this makes urban potholes wince-making. It’s also not the most frugal vehicle on the planet, hovering somewhere around 20 mpg when we drove it sensibly and, um, somewhat south of there when pressing on. But long drives in Eco mode should make 27 or 28 mpg more than possible, and the 18.5 gallon tank gives it a lot of range. We’re not sure you’d want one as an everyday car, but it wouldn’t be impossible, thanks to the breadth of ability granted by all those electronic systems that can change the car from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde and back.

The Stingray is so competent, gaining or shedding speed so rapidly and with such composure, that it left us wondering whether it was actually too fast for the public highway. From a standstill, 60 mph is about four seconds away, and from there to extralegal speed is just a toe prod more. The engine is relatively unstressed (460 bhp from 6.2L) and redlines at 6500 rpm, but the gear ratios are well-chosen, with 7th gear for cruising on the freeway and 3rd and 4th there for instant smiles and neck-snapping acceleration. The brakes are also extremely good; lots of pedal feel and stopping power, although in truth we never really approached their limits (and neither should you unless you’re on a track).

Fear not the Stingray

Fear might be a better reason not to drive a Stingray daily. The fear of explaining to a State Trooper why you think posted speed limits don’t apply to bright yellow sports cars, but also the fear that one could become desensitized to the car’s performance, resulting in a need for even more power and even more speed. Should that happen, GM does have you covered with an even hotter version of the car, the Z06. That ups the ante to 650 bhp and 650 lb-ft thank to a supercharger, coupled with active aerodynamics and even more carbon fiber.