Ray wrote:
But I can't shake off how the Europeans look down thier noses at our cars. Hell, I've heard nothing but snide remarks from Jeremy Clark about the new Z06. It's quite possibly the best supercar for the money and all that is being said about it is it's American.
The fact is that you look at it from the US perspective based on the situation in US while to understand our point of view you should look at it from the European perspective based on the situation in Europe, the two are very different.
For example you say in US you can buy 3 Z06 for a F430.
Well, here even if the strong € theoretically should favour it, you can’t even buy 2 for 1 because the Z06 costs more than half a F430 or Gallardo, 90k € vs 150-160k €.
And, frankly, at 90k € a car isn’t certainly cheap, it’s basically the same needed for a Porsche 997S (92-93k), while the 4S gets close to 100k, and the GT3 to 115k.
Then you have to pay annual taxes and insurance, these are proportional not only to car’s cost but to power and engine displacement too, so you have to spend a lot each year for the pleasure to own these 7 litres.
Next is fuel consumption, for European driving style and roads isn’t as good as what the long 6th gear makes you believe from numbers on paper, and at 1.2€/litre, close to 6$/gal, to fill her up means again lot of money.
Maintenance and repair of a Z06 then aren’t as easy or cheap as in US and at the end, after you kept it for a couple of years and want to sell it, the Corvette has basically no market here and lost most of its value already.
All the above makes of the Z06 a car that is reserved to a person with an already quite high level of earnings, who most likely owns at least 1-2 further cars of high level; such person probably expects from a sportcar of that cost something more, as overall package, than the Z06 offers; possibly for him/her the F430 and Gallardo are still too costly but he’s not light years distant from affording them, and certainly could easily afford some thousand € more and buy a Porsche 4S or even a GT3 without thinking twice about the money difference.
In short we don’t deny that the Z06 is undoubtedly a good and fast car and in particular it’s perfect for its market in US, but European supercars on the European market are still preferable for many reasons, hence why we don’t consider the Zee-Oh-Six a gift from heaven as you do.
At the end about the Z06 vs F430 on track, I would like to make a long due observation since the argument appears every now and then.
The F430 on track is easily faster than the Z06 and it’s just normal that that’s the case, even if it has a bit less power, it’s an overall better car, more balanced with a better chassis etc etc.
The Z06 has a chance to be competitive and in particular situations marginally faster, only when confronted with an F430 equipped with the Bridgestone tyres standard.
That’s because Ferrari reasoning, not only for the F430 but for the entire production, is that a person with enough money to buy a Ferrari also has a couple thousand € to spend for a set of high performance tyres to use the few times per year he decides to have fun on track and fully unlock the car’s potential (assuming he’s able to...).
Consequently as standard equipment they mount tyres meant to be a safe choice for road use, that work well on both dry and wet, focused on forgiveness and durability. The compromise sacrifices absolute performance on track, but only there, on the road those are excellent tyres and someone even thinking about pushing enough to find out the difference in peak performance should be immediately arrested.
With the Z06 on the contrary GM needed mostly to impress with pure performance visible on paper, so low laptime, high skidpad lateral g numbers and all the things that are easily measurable and make the happiness of magazine readers. Consequently they put on it as standard equipment big tailor-made Goodyear F1 Supercar definitively dry grip oriented, with a shallow tread, not really good on wet and not very durable.
When the F430 is equipped with equally performance oriented Pirelli P.Zero Corsa System (available as option) there’s an evident performance difference in favour of the F430, as demonstrated by the recent comparative test made by both Quattroruote (Italian magazine) and Road&Track (American magazine) that tested 6 supercars at Vairano.
http://www.roadandtrack.com/article.asp ... le_id=3757
The best time on the handling track was set by F430, 1’17”4, followed by Gallardo, 1’17”8. Viper and Z06 were third at 1’19”5, just 1 tenth better than GT40, last the 911T with 1’19”9.
It just doesn't apply to every other country in the world.
