Review: C7 & Spring Mountain Driving School

[VictorH]

Ron Fellows Corvette Driving Program – Level 2 Advanced Program
October 9-10, 2014

Just completed the 2 day advanced Corvette driving school at Spring Mountain Motorsports park which is about 60 miles north of Las Vegas. Overall, a very nice program and very well run. Not too much classroom time and not too many non-track exercises. Instructors were uniformly excellent. There were a total of 13 students and as with the BMW schools it takes a few sessions to get the students sorted by ability and speed. The facilities are very nice with a nice club house, pool and bar. The track is relatively short, 2.2 miles without much elevation change and it’s pretty tight and technical, but there is a pretty decent back straight to air out the cars. Reminds me a bit of Mid-Ohio but without the elevation change. Weather was perfect mid 80s with scant clouds. The setting is very pretty surrounded by mountains and desert.
I would recommend this class if you are inclined. If you have any track (well maybe not any) experience then you can skip level 1 and go straight to level 2. Not sure a Richard Petty driving experience would get you an okay for level 2, but the standards are not that high. Just takes a phone call.

The cars
2014 C7, Corvettes, all Z51 optioned with 3,000-6,000 miles on them, all manual transmissions. I’ve never driven a Corvette and so I had no experience on this track or this vehicle. My impressions as follows:

Interior: Really not bad (pretty good?). It’s certainly better than previous generations (they had some C6 Corvettes around). Seats are actually pretty good, either standard or sport/competition seats are comfortable with good side bolstering to keep you in the seat while cornering. Dash is okay, certainly more fitting for what would be considered an upscale model from GM. I was not so keen on a couple of items. Headroom, is lacking and this depends on both what seat option, evidently the standard seats adjust lower and what type of roof. The “sunroof” type roof has more headroom than the standard roof, but then you have the sunlight coming through the roof all the time. The gauge layout to me is a bit odd too. Now there are lots of customizable things you can do with the displays, but nothing is really that interesting. The speedo is off to the left but the tach which is in the middle is an electronic one with “shift-lights” and bar graph type of output. Even though all these cars had heads-up display I didn’t really care for the layout. The controller which looks a bit like the idrive BMW controller is also only okay but particularly on the magnetic shock optioned cars there are too many submenus and once set it’s hard to confirm what setting you are in unless you just go through the whole process again. Adjustability of the steering wheel is very nice and the pedals are good for heel and toe. The door opening is electronic, another feature I did not care for as sometimes it would partially open and need a second button push to get the door fully unlatched, maybe I was doing something wrong here and there but I prefer a mechanical door release.

Motor: One of the nicer features of the car. Motor is has really good output. It certainly has more torque than the S65, but it’s not really big block Chevy impressive. The motor needs some revs to get it really moving but it’s got a pretty linear power output and sounds pretty good too. Redline is 6,500 but didn’t really feel like it needed to be pushed to redline to get good output. It certainly pulls a lot stronger than a stock M3 and gets up to triple digit speeds relatively effortlessly. We each probably drove perhaps 5-8 different examples of the same vehicle and there were at least 2 cars that had a rough idle (not a high overlap cam type of rough idle) that was just plain not smooth. Both those cars ran just as well as the others but for some reason they didn’t like to idle as smooth as the others.

Handling I would lump handing and suspension together since this was a track event and there was no street driving. Overall, a pretty nice handling car and pretty neutral on the track. Understeer is really just a result of driver inputs and not how they are set up from the factory. When things get loose with this car there is much more of a tendency for the rear end to step out. This happened to me twice on day one, but it’s not difficult to catch so you can gather it back in again and go on your way. The amount of mechanical grip available is pretty impressive. I would say that the steering was only okay. There is really not much road feel at all. You can feel what the tires are doing but you can’t really feel the road surface through your fingers. The turn in ability of the car is pretty good. It’s not as precise (by this I mean where you think you are placing the car based on steering and pedal inputs versus where the car actually goes) as I was expecting, that is if the gold standard is a Porsche GT3 (my gold standard) or even a Cayman then the Corvette is substantially below this. It’s not bad but there is just a little bit missing there. The suspension was pretty compliant but again this is just one track which has some bumps but was overall pretty smooth. Despite the above I have no doubt the Corvette would outhandle and outperform the E9x M3 on most track configurations.
It’s a pretty good package with really high abilities but it just seemed a little bit unrefined compared to what most of the Europeans are putting out. Not sure what I mean by this but I guess it’s a combination of compliance, noise isolation while still providing good feedback through the steering wheel and seat.

Would I buy one? Certainly the value relative to the amount of performance is not available from any other manufacturer. There were several people who complained about the poor dealer service on their new vehicles but we’re not immune to this either. The cost of replacement parts is much cheaper than any Eurpean OEM as well. I don’t know. The Z-06 which evidently is coming out in December (at least to this driving school) is supposed to be a whole other animal. I guess we’ll see but if it’s similar to this car with gobs more power, I’m not sure that would be a huge benefit. If the suspension is more refined and developed (I think it’s supposed to be) then this might be an interesting vehicle, but for more money. It’s tempting, but then you have the “would you daily drive this car” issue.

[Ezio]

nice review. I am leaning towards getting a C7 because of the downsized engines coming out of Germany.

I also thought about getting the Z, but i feel it would be to much for a daily driver.