Chevrolet News Car

“I told ’em on the radio that I was pulling over a Z/28, and they said they don’t make them no more,” the cop says with a drawl straight off the pages of Faulkner. “I told ’em, ‘Whatever it is, this is a bad-ass car.’ ”
This member of Alabama’s finest claims that Dick Knoll, Camaro lead integration engineer and driver of the Z/28 I’m riding in, put a wheel over the yellow line a mile back on Interstate 20. Knoll doesn’t dispute it because it’s already evident that no tickets will be written today. This is a fan-boy shakedown. The officer barely glances at Knoll’s driver’s license before collecting his take. Cell phone already in hand, his question is rhetorical: “Do you mind if I take a few pictures?”
Officer Instagram can’t be faulted. There’s been enough hype around the Camaro Z/28 revival to launch a dozen blogs. It is retro done right: the return of a storied name applied to a modern car crafted in the same spirit as the 1967 original. Like that first Z/28 that homologated Chevy’s Trans-Am racer, this new incarnation’s mission is to lay down fast laps on a road course. It was developed on the Nürburgring, Road Atlanta, Road America, and Virginia International Raceway, as well as at GM’s own Milford road course. Fittingly, our road test covered more distance on the 2.4-mile track at Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, Alabama, than on public streets.

The Z/28 is not the quickest, the fastest, or the most powerful Camaro, but it is the most expensive at $75,000, or more than three times the price of a six-cylinder model. Its only clear-cut competi­tor is the $49,990 Mustang Boss 302 Laguna Seca that Ford stopped building last year. And even then, the parallels exist in concept, not execution. With a 7.0-liter V-8, carbon-ceramic brakes, damper technology borrowed from Formula 1, and the widest front tires on a production car, Chevy’s Camaro Z/28 is a Boss 302 fighter raised on growth hormones and testosterone.

How to make a 7.0-liter V-8 look small? Put it in a Camaro. The cold-air intake is one of the few changes GM made in transplanting the LS7 engine from the outgoing Corvette Z06.

Plucked from GM’s last track-day ­special, the 2013 Corvette Z06, the Z/28's port-injected LS7 V-8 is fortified with new pistons and titanium connecting rods whose bearing inserts are now spray-coated for improved durability. There are also a cold-air intake, revised exhaust headers, and a repackaged dry-sump oiling system, but there’s more hardware that’s carry-over than new under the hood. At 505 horsepower and 481 pound-feet of torque, the Z/28’s LS7 makes just six more pound-feet than when this engine made its debut eight years ago.
Just as it did back then, the LS7 oozes power whether the Z/28 is standing still or at speed. The car quakes under a loping idle as heat radiates from the carbon-fiber extractor and blurs the view through the windshield. Racing toward a 7000-rpm redline, the Z/28 smears Barber’s manicured landscaping as if it were a still-wet watercolor, while the exhaust’s raucous bawl ­rattles the cabin. Zero to 60 mph passes in 4.4 seconds, and the quarter-mile clears in 12.7, by which time you’re doing 116 mph. True, the Z/28 isn’t as quick as the ZL1 in a straight line, but that’s not the point.
The six-speed manual transmission shared with the Camaro SS 1LE is geared for road-course duty, with closer ratios passed through a shorter 3.91:1 final drive. Shifts are heavy and stiff, and the pedals are spaced a toe’s-width too far apart for easy heel-and-toe action. The substantial displacement of the naturally aspirated V-8 compensates with a low end that’s nearly as forceful as its top end is intense. We work over Barber using third and fourth gears and every rev between 3000 and 7000 rpm.
The Pirelli P Zero Trofeo Rs are essentially street-legal racing tires so tacky that, during development testing, they occasionally stuck to the pavement better than to the wheels they were mounted on. To keep the Pirellis from slipping around the rim, the wheels on production Z/28s are media-blasted to increase friction at the mating surface, a common practice in racing.
The massive front tires are the same size as the rears, a remedy first used on the 1LE to address the Camaro SS’s penchant for understeer. Here, though, the rubber is sized up to 305/30 and mounted on smaller, lighter 19-inch forged aluminum wheels. When warm, the tires stick to the pavement like four wads of melted Wrigley’s. In Barber’s long, mid-speed corners we saw as much as 1.06 g of lateral stick, despite a damp track and temperatures struggling to top 40 degrees. The Z/28 is neutral and responsive at the limits, and the Torsen-type limited-slip differential prudently doles out power on corner exit. The flat-bottom steering wheel has the same heft and on-center sharpness as the Camaro ZL1’s. Unfortunately, it lacks the stimulating feedback experienced in the best sports cars.
The cross-drilled carbon-ceramic brake discs are clamped by six-piston front and four-piston rear calipers that bite just as hard after 50 minutes of lapping as they do on the first laps. From 70 mph, they haul the Z/28 to a stop in 155 feet.
There are, of course, stiffer springs and bushings, and the downsized wheels allowed engineers to drop the center of gravity by 1.3 inches and use smaller and lighter anti-roll bars. The cornerstones of the suspension are four spool-valve dampers, a technology used by Red Bull Racing as it claimed four Formula 1 championships between 2010 and 2013. Until now, the closest these shocks have come to a production car is Aston Martin’s $1.8-million One-77.
Spool-valve dampers don’t use electronic components or magnetic fluid, and they are neither driver-adjustable nor adaptable to road conditions. Instead, the spool valve’s merit lies in tailor-shaped internal ports that improve the precision and effective range available to engineers as they tune the shocks. They work magnificently. The Z/28 transitions from left to right to braking and acceleration with nearly imperceptible load transfer. It is stoic and stable as it bounds over the curbing and hunkers into hard braking through the tight corkscrew of Barber’s eighth and ninth turns. On the road, firm doesn’t mean harsh, either. As we bomb over a bridge deck that is set two inches above the road that abuts it, I tense in anticipation of a jarring impact—it never materializes.

Left: What Recaro seats look like when scaled to Z/28 proportions.

Even without the ZL1’s magnetic dampers, the Z/28 retains ride-height sensors at each wheel to feed data to the five-mode perform­ance-traction-management system that determines when to straighten the car with the brakes, reduce torque via engine management, or feed power to the rear wheels. The sensors also enable a “fly mode,” in which the engine controller holds torque constant when the car goes airborne, rather than cut fuel as a typical Chevy does. Why doesn’t every car have a fly mode?
And yet Chevy made great efforts to keep the Z/28’s tires firmly in contact with the ground. The front splitter, the wheel-arch extensions, and the rear spoiler are all part of a functional—if not beautiful—aero kit that makes 150 pounds of downforce at 150 mph when an accessory Gurney flap is screwed onto the back of the spoiler. Chevrolet stripped its gold bow tie off the front grille. In its place is a hollowed-out emblem, cheekily called the “flow tie,” allowing extra air into the engine bay at the rate of 88 cubic feet per minute.
Camaro chief engineer Al Oppenheiser claims the Z/28 team “took out everything that didn’t make it go faster or wasn’t required by law.” So the car comes without air conditioning and only a single speaker to sound the seatbelt-reminder chime. Floor mats aren’t included, and the emergency tire-inflation kit is left out unless you buy in Rhode Island or New Hampshire, where it’s mandatory equipment. The engineers even replaced the rear glass with a pane 0.01 inch thinner to nix 0.9 pound.

How to identify a Z/28: badges, lots and lots of badges.

We won’t be talking about a true lightweight Camaro until at least 2016, though, when the car is redesigned on the Alpha platform. The Z/28 we tested was equipped with the sole option package—five extra speakers and air conditioning—and weighed 3862 pounds. It’s not light, but that is 35 pounds shy of a 1LE and more than 300 pounds slimmer than a ZL1.
Even without looking at the scales, we feel it’s a stretch to say Chevrolet stripped the Z/28 of everything that didn’t make it faster. The car still has carpeting, a headliner, full interi­or trim, and (lighter) rear seats. The wide Recaros are all-day comfortable rather than track-day snug. Other than the flat-bottom steering wheel and rescaled speedo and tachometer, from the driver’s seat the Z/28 could easily be confused for a six-cylinder Camaro. If you want to convince someone how serious this car is, you’ll have to pop the trunk, where there isn’t a single piece of plastic trim or carpet.
Or drive the Z/28 on the track. Because that’s really the only way to show off cornering this flat, grip this abundant, power this ­visceral, and a car this bad-ass.