Month: September 2013

Motor Trend wasn’t able to get a couple of the newest supercars – the 2014 Corvette Stingray Z51 and the Ferrari F12 – for its annual Best Driver’s Car contest earlier this year, when the Porsche 911 Carrera 4S took the title again for the second straight year.

Fortunately, the magazine was finally able to procure samples of the Stingray and the F12 Berlinetta and put the two masterpieces through the paces against the 911 in a mini-sampling of three of the world’s best cars.

Since there was such a wide gap in the prices, said Motor Trend, “we decided the only fair way to approach this comparison test would be to apply a version of our Best Driver’s Car rules. Metrics like value and design get flung out the proverbial window in favor of how great the car is to drive on the highway, a back-country twisty road, and, of course, our home away from home, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

We’ll go ahead and tell you that they judged the Porsche to be tops again, but don’t think the Corvette wasn’t able to make the 911 sweat it out.

“For the first time in my professional career, I can honestly say that a new Corvette is a complete package,” Motor Trend’s Jonny Lieberman concluded. “There’s nothing anywhere to betray America’s favorite sports car. Stuff like crap seats, crappier interior, and an indismissible feeling of cheapness have been banished to the dustbin of automotive history. The new Corvette absolutely rocks.”

In fact, Lieberman says that at Laguna Seca, he found the Stingray “nearly as planted as the 911. That said, I believe the 991 iteration of the 911 has the best suspension damping in the history of the production car.”

We all know that Chevy’s engineers aimed at making the C7 better than the 911. Their efforts paid off, according to Lieberman. “The RWD Corvette puts its power down to the ground as well as the AWD 911 does,” he wrote. “Big props to the guys who perfected that trick sport differential – it’s close to magic.”

Looking at the stats, it’s hard to believe that the Stingray is even being compared to the Porsche and Ferrari, considering that the former sticks for $151,260 and the latter for a whopping $434,144.

“If we were to compare the C7 with the 911 in a contest where money mattered, it would be hard to ignore the fact that the Porsche costs twice what the Chevy does,”

Lieberman admits. “Really, really hard.”

Check out the video to see the three cars in action…

Source:
Motor Trend

Related:
[VIDEO] Motor Trend Dyno’s the 2014 Corvette Stingray
[VIDEO] Justin Bell Drives the 2014 Corvette Stingray at Laguna Seca
[VIDEO] Motor Trend Tests the 2014 Corvette Stingray Z51