Z versus the SuperCar Club

BrianMSmith

Last Friday, on my anual road trip down to Windy Ridge and Lava Canyon at St. Helens, I found myself in the middle of a SuperCar club weekend out. I arrived in Randall and found about 20ish Ferraris, mostly newer F430s, some F360s, a fewer older ones, half a dozen Lambos, and some Porsches. These Ferraris are incredible machines, way better in the metal than in the magazines, completely over the top - which is the whole point. I was suprised to see that the Z interior looked just as good, even better than all but the newest of the Ferraris. So I drove along for a while with the Ferrari parade, and the Z looked like part of the show, if you didn't look too hard or know much about cars. It was fun to see the Ferraris in action, they make quite an impressive noise, but the lot of them were going much too slow for me, I had to drive right around them.

So, this being my first proper drive of the Z, it was very impressive on the best mountain roads we have here in Washington....much faster than anyone driving a Ferrari on this day out. I took about half the life off the tires in 4 hours of driving. But I was wishing I had two more pistons and +100 on the power and torque (I miss the engine in my old hot rod Camaro SS). Unless you have it wound up to 6k rpm, it doesn't do much at all. But it does carry huge corner speed...I hardly used the brakes all day, is very composed on the rough sink-holed volcano roads, and loves to go 90+mph as the car gets a very settled and solid feeling, perhaps from some aero downforce.