Thursday, 26 January 2012 04:00
moderator
Nothing frightens autojournalists more than the nondescript. Awful is better than mediocre. We can work with terrible or excellent in equal measure and neither the sublime nor the ridiculous scare us. Just don’t give us bland.
Hell, then, is a subcompact wagon with a 110-horsepower engine and a tan-on-beige paint job. There is no “it,” no attention-grabbing superlative that is both the car’s raison d’être and our easily discerned headline.
Chevrolet’s new Camaro ZL1 has exactly the opposite problem — a vast plethora of attention grabbers, each worthy of front-page coverage. Should I lead off with its purported 580 horsepower, an above-the-fold headline no matter how little you care about performance cars? Should I tease with its seven-minute 41.27-second time around the world-famous Nürburgring, the circuit in Germany that is now the benchmark for fast cars? Or do I lead with the more pedestrian but equally exciting fact that a Canadian ZL1 will cost only $58,000, a seeming pittance of a markup from the $37,735 SS version and — perhaps even more important to Canadians used to scanning for U.S. bargains — barely seven per cent above the US$54,095 sticker price south of the border?
What’s surprising, however, is despite those noteworthy numbers, the most surprising aspect of the new Camaro is its sophistication. Despite its relatively lowly Camaro lineage, miserly price tag and cartoonish movie roles, the ZL1 is a bona fide supercar.
via
Preview: 2012 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 is a supercar bargain | Driving | National Post.
ALTON, Virginia – There are 17 turns on Virginia International Raceway – and only 4 expletives in the English language fit to express the sensation of the 2012 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 exiting them at full throttle.
After almost three years on the market, the Chevrolet Camaro is hardly a rare sight on the road. Some Camaro may have once enjoyed the feeling of being the only kid on the block with Chevy’s revived muscle car, but now it seems to take a bit more to stand out from the crowd. That said, we think Lingenfelter’s new Signature Series Performance packages should have no problem whatsoever.
I have a confession to make. Sitting at the lunch table after thrashing the 2012 Camaro ZL1 on track–unrestricted, an opportunity offered to only a few of us at Firebird International Raceway, home of the Bondurant Racing School–I made a spontaneous association and foolishly blurted it out. I compared the ZL1 to the 2012 Porsche 911.
Ford versus Chevy. It’s one of the greatest rivalries in the world, joining the likes of Coke versus Pepsi and Michigan versus Ohio State. While the Mustang and Camaro can’t be credited as the first two vehicles to start the Blue Oval and Golden Bowtie wars, it’s fair to say the two muscle cars kicked the battle into high gear in the 1960s.
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