Bye bye ZO6...

[h22sparkle]

I actually like musclecars but this is redicoulous. reason being domestics and imports should unite together. Maybe we all can learn stuff from them aswell as they can learn shit from us. We are both from the same allmotor aspect but around different technology to do so. WE all know who the real enemy is here and thats the cops,insurance,asshole drivers who cant drive,thieves,people who dont know how to work on motors at all and say they do fake ass engine builders. Lets just squash the non-sense this post is so fuckin old my email is gettin flooded with the responses on this post that somehow i dont know why just comes back from the dead .

[shawn.hayden]

good post Accrdkid I never thought to bring up Carlo's beast

[deevergote]

I know for a fact that nobody else had the same IP as me. Yes, that is a good reason to get banned.

Whenever a high 12 second car beats a low 12/high 11 second car story comes around, I seriously question it. I don't care if it's one Z06 versus another. I call BS on plenty of stories like this on the domestic forum I go to. I'm not trying to deny that an import can beat a domestic. I know for a fact that plenty of imports can beat domestics vice versa. I just think all of you need to question stories like this after looking at the facts.

I'm new to Accord performance, since I only recently bought an Accord. I'm still taking in the potentials of this car. I know a great deal about Mustangs and Corvettes. I've seen Civics beat Cobras, and I've seen Supras beat Cobras. It is a rare event, but it happens. I will not deny that. It does take a hell of a lot of work to get an import up to par with a Cobra or Z06.

Only the guy that posted this thread knows exactly what happened, if it did happen. It's all a story of fiction without a video clip to prove it. Believe what you want. The story doesn't add up to me, but I wasn't there nor was anyone else so none of us can prove it as being a fact.

Man, you have intelligent arguments, and you don't attempt to put import owners down (partially attributed to the fact that you are an import owner as well, I guess!) You are more than welcome to stay on here.

Not all of us are bench racers... in fact, most of us aren't. The rules of the board are pretty much set to discourage imaginary racing. I know. I set them myself.

Put it this way... My car as it stands is capable of running 14.5. My BEST pass so far, due to my lack of skill, was 15.577. That's MORE than a full second slower than it should be! Now put some dude in a Z06 that doesn't know how to launch, or is afraid to launch properly, and his 11 second car may very well run 13s. It was said before on this thread... the times that these cars are reported to have run were done by professional drivers. an 11.4 second car reported in a magazine may only get 12.5 when driven by Joe Weekenddriver. Also, no two cars are equal... Some cars have a little more power, some have a little less. In this case, that might matter.

[ampstang]

AccrdKid, I think you have the wrong impression. I found this thread after I joined the site. Once again, if you haven't read my previous replies, I have two cars, a Mustang and an Accord. That doesn't make me a Corvette guy. The original thread was a story about a 12 second Honda beating a Z06 at a light. I am new here and don't know how much credibility this guy has. So, I said to myself, assuming that he is a credible person, "wow, that's quite a kill, that Z06 driver needs to learn how to drive that thing."

After scrolling down while reading the rest of the posts, I saw things like, "Z06s can only run high 12s on an optimal day." "Z06 drivers spend all of that money for a slow car." Now that's just being ignorant, that's why I attempted to inform some of the people here that no, the Z06 is an awesomely powerful car. I hope some of you get a chance to drive or ride in one. I have, and those things are beasts. I've also gotten to ride in some fast imports when I go to the Texas World Speedway.

Anything that runs 12 second quarters is a fast car, whether it be an import or domestic. I'll end this post by giving you an article about the Z06. My motives for this is not to insult any of you, only to learn more about a fast car. There is nothing wrong with that. I love reading about specs of different types of performance cars. If you can beat a car given the title "Supercar Killer", you have one beast of a car.



Supercar Killer
Chevy's '04 Z06 does 11s bone stock--and so much more

By Rick Jensen


Any automotive engineer has probably forgotten more than I know about cars, but this I know for sure: It's not good seeing a roadway's broken white line from the passenger-side window.

On a dreary March day, the fates threw together Chevy's press fleet 2004 Z06 Corvette, Jersey's rain-slicked Garden State Parkway, and GMHTP's "Stick Shift" Steve Baur for an ironic game of "Kill The Sober On St. Patrick's Day." You see, this business takes all kinds--some folks you can control, and others, well, you can only hope to contain. Baur comes replete with porn-star good looks and quite possibly the most FUBAR Floridian lingo known to man.





Disturbing, yes--but not immediately harmful to others. But when a guy continually works "putting it on the wood" and "I gave him 4500 worth of team Magnaflow" into normal conversation, flipping him the keys to a 3000-pound, 405-horsepower rocket on a rainy day will make for some serious aftermath. There are people in this world with restraint, and there are guys who yank the E-brake in traffic. Baur's penchant for powershifting anything from that steaming turd Blue Thunder on up is legendary, but I figured that this East Coast monsoon would keep his twitchy right foot at bay. I was wrong.
So there we were, post-tollbooth, with our Machine Silver Z06's tach streaking toward six grand and the gearshift lever heading for Third, when the Goodyear Supercars broke off their highly desirable relationship with the wet asphalt. The nose jerked left, the ass end went right, my sheriff's badge puckered, and I got a great look at a sharp-edged metal guardrail and lots of trees. Hope company medical has death benefits...

So began seven days of delirious stupidity with the baddest ride to ever wear the crossed flags, the Corvette Z06. If possible, we'd spend hours waxing poetic about all of the technology loaded into this steal of a supercar (the death-defying Active Handling system comes to mind), but a week spent dealing with this puppy's monumental g-forces has curdled our short-term memory like a double-barrel bong hit. This is the first new GM vehicle I'm proud to say that I could easily kill myself in--and that, my friends, is a good thing.

Let's talk acceleration. Every auto enthusiast worth his salt drives a "fast" car, so we all have a basic understanding of how it feels. But GM Powertrain mixed up some serious hoodoo when they mated the super-geared M12 6-speed to a pushrod motor capable of 6500 revs, then dropped it into the automotive equivalent of Lura Flynn Boyle. (We knew the Corvette brand team was a degenerate bunch of racers when we first heard about the Z06's thinner windshield and lighter battery and exhaust for weight savings. Our tester also featured the new-for-'04 carbon-fiber hood, and weighed in at 3074 pounds--with half a tank of gas!) From 3500 rpm to above six grand, the LS6's pull is so violent that it feels as if it will pull the front of the car off, leaving you dumbfoundedly stranded in the middle of the road. This Einstein-on-acid space/time warp is so brutal that it incites giddiness: I seriously started to imagine what Captain Kirk felt like when the Enterprise hauled ass--and I hate Star Trek.

"This thing is stupid fast", "It rips", and "Holy balls, what a car" echoed off of the office walls--from the MM&FF crew no less. Corvette brand team: when you get die-hard Ford fanatics to start talking about going to a GM dealership, you've obviously done something right. Now it was time to put some hard numbers to those exclamations.

1/4-MILE
You can only go 135 on East Coast roads for so long before you end up either in jail or dead, so a trip to Englishtown was set to really probe the Z06's limits. On March 22, the GMHTP crew converged on Raceway Park to find 50-degree temps, a 30.00 barometer, and low humidity--racin' weather. Baur drove the 'Vette in, slapped a couple of ice bags on the LS6's intake, and called it good; the Gen. III doesn't need you to fuss over it for optimum power. In fact, previous LS1/LS6 tests showed that trap speeds actually responded favorably with a bit of heat in the alloy mill. Thirty minutes later the track was prepped, and Steve strapped up the Simpson brain hanger and got that explosive titanium exhaust flowing. One smoky burnout later, the silver Z06 crept into RP's right lane and up to the tree. The revs climbed to 3200 and the tree dropped...

On paper, Run 1 was a throwaway: Baur aggressively slipped the clutch and hopped to a 1.98 60-foot, and the lightning-quick revs of the LS6 smacked into the limiter in First and Second. But the clocks begged to differ--after all that, they lit up with a 12.29 at 117.03--unbelievable. One blurted-out expletive later and the 'Vette was back for a hot-lap. The LS6 was just getting warmed up and it showed, with an identical launch rpm and less clutch slip, a better 1.96 60-foot, and three solid gear changes leading to a 12.16 at 117.84 miles an hour.

Forty minutes later, Baur tried a new approach: getting the clutch out a little quicker meant less of a chance for wheelhop. The same 3200-rpm launch resulted in a slight bog, but the 1.94 sixty was an improvement. The Englishtown headwind let us know that all gears were changed cleanly, and seconds later a 12.03 at 117.83 flashed.

At this point the excitement was starting to build--three consecutive runs had dropped the ET down three tenths, and we felt that there was even more left in it. During the 20-minute cooldown, we decided to get a little more aggressive with the launch; the catch was that the IRS couldn't take too much more power, and with wheelhop still a threat we'd have to find the perfect point between slip and bog. Not this time: Steve left at 3200 again, but attempts to aggressively slip the clutch resulted in massive wheelhop and a 2.06 60-foot. The 12.21 ET at 117.73 put us back to square one, and with the track starting to go away, we wondered if there would be any bettering the 12.03.

Baur immediately pulled around for another go. The clutch was hot, the coolant temp was 200 plus, and the first 60 feet of traction had seen better days. What the Z06 did next flies in the face of conventional racer wisdom, and cements it in the annals of GM lore: A light-slip launch got the clutch out quick enough to avoid wheelhop, and the 'Vette shot to a 1.90 60-foot. The 6-speed was manhandled through Second and Third, with the silver missile screaming through the eighth-mile clocks at an astounding 7.80 at 94mph. And once in Fourth, the 3074-pound badass broke through the 11-second barrier, running 11.97 at 118.80.

Eleven ninety-seven--that's a tough number to fathom. Even more so because this thing was dead stock. We didn't pull the air filter. Shit, we didn't even check the tire pressure! And it is so easy to drive fast. Only two parts of the Z06 Drag Race Experience are cause for concern: the IRS doesn't care for a lot of clutch slip; rather, it prefers the driver to keep the revs up and let the clutch out fast. And a 1-2 powershift can be dicey without optimum traction--this thing makes hella power and will go skating across lanes. Otherwise, looking like a drag-race hero is cake in the Z06--my automatic-driving ass pulled a 1.89 60-foot en route to a 12.10 at 116 on my first run! Several more passes were made that afternoon, but 11.97 stands as the best. Incidentally, the radar gun was hooked up to record some 0-60 times, and even with approximately 50 percent of the track's original grip left, it only took the Corvette 3.91 seconds to get there.

[ampstang]

BRAKING
E-Town's 1/4-mile strip was also our brake-testing venue, although the 100-0 and 60-0 testing was cut short due to radar equipment malfunctions. But let it be known that with Baur behind the wheel, the best 100-0 stop came in at 317 feet. The Z06 also recorded multiple 117-foot 60-0 readings. Brake fade came into play only slightly, and Steve touted the 12.6-inch front/11.8-inch rear brakes and the quick-cycling ABS system for sucking the 'Vette to the pavement while providing drama-free panic stops. It doesn't get more effortless than this.

SKIDPAD
The Real-World Skidpad was in rough shape the day the Z06 came to play. The harsh Jersey winter really beat on the E-Town asphalt, and we had a few new dips and chunks of pavement to deal with besides the usual nails, wingnuts, etc. Regardless, the 200-foot circle was marked off with orange cones, the G-Analyst computer was hooked up and calibrated, and we were off. It was immediately clear that the FE4 suspension, with huge 30mm front/23mm rear stabilizer bars and ultra-gooey 265/40/17 front and 295/35/18 rear Goodyear Supercar tires, was in its element. Baur and I both made two three-lap clockwise/counter-clockwise runs, and even before we saw the results we knew that something special had just happened. Its steering weighting is magical--light at low speeds and progressively heavier once it is pushed. The car refused to give up its tenacious grip on the less-than-perfect asphalt, offering up only a bit of understeer and a slight squeal as the Supercars started to slide around the cones at high gs. At no point in the test, no matter how hard we pushed it, did the Corvette lose its balanced handling characteristics, and it took a hard whomp of the gas pedal to spin the car. In checking with the G-Analyst, the Z06 turned in .98g going clockwise, and a brain-sloshing 1.02g counter-clockwise reading, for a cool bi-directional average of 1.00g.



REAL-WORLD TEST: NORTH JERSEY
In the week GMHTP spent piloting the hardtop 'Vette, the staff was all over the pockmarked north New Jersey roads that we love to bitch about. We also found time for a leisurely 100-mph jaunt down the Shore to Toms River, and approximately 400 miles later, we had a pretty good bead on the Z06's personality. The FE4 suspension is definitely a firm ride, but it's much softer than you would expect from 18-inch rims and 35-profile tires. Whether it's the re-valved shocks or just three years of refinement on the SLA double-wishbone suspension, it just works. Although there's little chance of you ruffians ever seeing this feature in action, the skip-shift won't activate unless you're really dogging it; once you get over 2500 rpm, it goes away. As far as the Active Handling system, even with it on in the rain it will still let you get away with some hanky-panky in First until it and traction control shuts the party down in Second.
Audio input, from mechanical to road noise, was always present, but in a muted, subconscious sort of way. In Sixth at 60 miles an hour you're only turning 1500 rpm, and can't even tell that the motor is running; the whip of wind around excellent-sealing windows is the only indication. But drop the Tremec down a few gears, and the fury of a high-compression small-block rips through the titanium exhaust and straight to your soul. The LS6's awesome power, combined with brakes capable of turning any object not bolted down into a flying projectile, allows the driver to surgically insert himself into any crack in traffic.

The C5 has received numerous interior complaints since 1997, but save for the dopey Head Up display, we had a hard time figuring out why. Some say the look is too plastic; hey, if you want a dash cover made from an Italian cow's ass, buy a Ferrari--and spend triple over our tester's $52,720 sticker price. We loved the black leather buckets with Z06 embroidery, the six-way adjustable driver's seat, the dual express-down windows, and the dual-zone climate control. The Z06's gauges are way cool, and are dead steady over the hardest bumps. Above those gauges, outward visibility is what you would expect from a supercar killer: good enough. The fender bulges will always make parallel parking an adventure, and although side visibility is fine, checking the blind spot can be a chore with the hardtop's lack of glass. (Although going WOT in Second is a great way to erase a blind spot!) The stereo is acceptable fare, with the Bose speakers being the best part. Although the head unit's speed-sensing volume control is a nice touch, CDs will skip if you push the car hard enough on the street.

And take it from us, you will push it on the street. Driving Chevrolet's top-dog Z06 is the most exciting thing you can do with your clothes on--a magical, downright scary thrill ride with a completely doable $700 monthly payment. The Corvette team has its work cut out trying to improve on this performer. By the way, let me take this time to thank the Corvette engineers who crunched numbers for that Active Handling algorithm. You've given two GM-crazy screwballs a few more years of new car testing.

[cp[mike]]

ok, i deleted all the flame posts. this stops now...

[ampstang]

ok, i deleted all the flame posts. this stops now...

Thank you and sorry. That was really getting out of hand, but it sure was fun for a little bit.

[ampstang]

Can you knock my post count back up to 1500 before you deleted the flame posts? j/k

[dwf137]

baahahahahaha.. this thread amuses me. wlfpck, you need to take a chill pill..


Accords are not sports cars.
Z06's ARE sports cars.
Z06's come with more factory power then just about any Accord engine can dream of having.
Z06's cost more then any 1990-1993 accord ever has or will in the future.
I respect Z06's, I would love to own a Z06 but I would never get rid of my accord for one.


With that out of the way, I'm going to attempt to speak my opinion, lets see how many people can try and tear it apart.

2.6 has a beast of a NA accord. His car is beyond insane, and well above what most tuners on this board will ever achieve without going with insane ammounts of boost and nitrous... A 5th gen accord (94-97) owner on another board has a boosted SOHC vtec accord with 400 whp. Now that's another accord that's very capable of torching a z06, but it's boosted(cheating by a domestic racers stand point because it's too expensive and risky for them to do it).

I'm not going to sit here and say that domestics are complete crap, because I do not. I do believe that the technology used in imports, namely hondas and nissans is superior to most domestic sports cars. The domestic view of a sports car is displacement. The bigger of an engine they can get, the easier. This is true, it's much easier to make a 5.6L enigne powerfull and fast, plain and simple, but that's not all that's involved in making a car fast/powerfull.

What we have clashing in the domestic/japanese argument is a battle of intrests. It would be nice to have my car running 9 second quarter miles and still be a daily driver, but I know that's not going to happen, and I'm perfectly fine with that. My aim is not to be able to smash every car out there on the road, my goal is to make my car more fun to drive, and be somewhat economical. I could go out and get myself an older v8 mustang and do some cheap mods to that and be running much quicker times then my accord, but again, that's not what I'm looking for. I like the miles per gallon that I get, I like the fact that my car is a family sedan. I like the fact that I can drive my car in the snow. and i like the fact that it's cheap to insure

So untill I can afford a "race car" (which will not be a domestic), I will be spending money in my accord to make it more fun to drive, not to spank on every car out there.

and all of this talk about how us accord owners should get off the computer and out into the real world, last time I checked, you were the ones online, searching OTHER message boards so that you can flame us. Get off the computer and go see the turboed honda's that will smack your domestic "sports car" off the road

[ampstang]

Nice post dwf137. I am always amazed by how much power a 4 cylinder engine is capable of making. Even Caroll Shelby is. I saw a show with Funk Master Flex in it where he went to Caroll Shelby's garage. He was amazed at all the people who can squeeze out maximal power from such small engines. For those who don't know who he is. He's the most respected Ford racers ever. He made the 427 Shelby Cobra. Without a doubt one of the most impressive cars in automotive history. When you get a compliment from this guy, you know you're doing things right.

[H23 Lude]

Nice post dwf137. I am always amazed by how much power a 4 cylinder engine is capable of making. Even Caroll Shelby is. I saw a show with Funk Master Flex in it where he went to Caroll Shelby's garage. He was amazed at all the people who can squeeze out maximal power from such small engines. For those who don't know who he is. He's the most respected Ford racers ever. He made the 427 Shelby Cobra. Without a doubt one of the most impressive cars in automotive history. When you get a compliment from this guy, you know you're doing things right.

I saw that episode too

[wlfpck]

alright... now that i'm calm and things have calmed down. I have a serious question.

How do you make lets say a v8 mustang last for 200k miles? (i'm not bashing anyone, I just wanna know.)

[ampstang]

alright... now that i'm calm and things have calmed down. I have a serious question.

How do you make lets say a v8 mustang last for 200k miles? (i'm not bashing anyone, I just wanna know.)

I'm glad we've all cooled down a bit. Well, I would just say not drive hard all of the time. My old '66 Mustang had over 300K miles on it with very little maintance or problems. I see the kind of point your trying to make. My '90 Accord I used to have had over 100K miles on it before I got rear-ended and totalled. I have to tell you the truth. That was the most reliable car I've ever had.

[wlfpck]

alright what about the 87 vette. how reliable is that? cuz my friends selling his.

[ampstang]

alright what about the 87 vette. how reliable is that? cuz my friends selling his.

Sorry but, I wouldn't know. All I know is that my friend has an '87 and hasn't had any reliability trouble with it. It runs like a beast too.