After all of the rumors, blurry leaked magazine covers and artist renderings, the 2014 Chevrolet Corvette C7 is finally here. OK, so is the Corvette Stingray (as it is officially called) worth all the hullabaloo surrounding it? Short answer, yes. Long answer, absolutely, positively, without a doubt, yes. But, as LeVar Burton was fond of saying in Reading Rainbow, you don't have to take my word for it. The design and specs can speak for themselves.
Let start with the most important bit, the powerplant. The 2014 Corvette Stingray is still powered by a 6.2 liter LT1 V8 engine, but now it is churning out an estimated 450 horse and 450 lb-ft of torque. 450 & 450 for the base Corvette. Yeehaw! At 2,000 rpm when other cars, such as the Ferrari 458 Italia and the Porsche 911, are putting out about 200 lb-ft, the Corvette's LT1 is cranking at 400, an increase of about 50 lb-ft over the C6. That's quite a bit of grunt. While there's no word on the base C7 Corvette's weight, we do know that it will sprint from 0 to 60 mph in under four seconds. The prevailing wisdom puts that number closer to 3.7 or 3.8 seconds. Yeehaw, again! And, you can have flawless 0-60 runs all day long because the 2014 Corvette has launch control. Yeehaw, a third time!
And, it sounds good too. The exhaust diameter has grown from 2.5 inches to 2.75 inches over the last generation and is far less restrictive to the tune of a 13 percent improvement on the standard exhaust and 27 percent on the active exhaust system. A pair of butterfly valves refine the exhaust note further when cruising in V-4 mode through the cylinder deactivation. By the way, I'm not entirely sure that true cylinder deactivation has ever really played well with a manual transmission. I look forward to seeing it work here.
