Car and Driver

CAR AND DRIVER Magazine
Tested August 30th 1999

Car and Driver Magazine completed its testing of our C500/RSR Supercar on Monday Aug 30th. This is a recounting of the days events as seen by Doug and his crew. This is not the Car and Driver article. You'll have to wait till December for that, so stay tuned..

Rippie and crew
Big smiles after the high speed test
From left to right: Roger Schroer-TRC manager, Doug Rippie, Steve Melnick-car owner, Al Korbel-another C500RSR car owner, and Don Schroeder-Assistant Editor of Car And Driver

The most important point that we can get across to all of you about this car test is that it's as close to "real world" results as you could possibly ever get. We were given the option like many other tuners are given to tweak the car with changes in tire compounds, air pressure, engine calibration and suspension adjustment to obtain the best numbers for each test performed. Instead, we elected to give C&D a customer car right from his garage which he drives to work every day and races at road courses on the weekends. In fact we drove the car 7 hours from Chicago to East Liberty, Ohio for the test then the Don drove the car 3 hours to the Chrysler Proving Grounds (no trailer queens please!).

Absolutely no adjustments where made on this car during the test. For instance our alignment settings are for road course racing which is designed to have just a little push or "understeer" for safety. This will NOT give the best numbers for the skid pad test, a more neutral setup will perform better but we wanted true results. Also, for the 0-60 and 1/4 mile test we could have run D.O.T slicks or even drag radials or even just simply lowered the tire pressures but no, we used BFG KD street radials right off the rack at normal tire pressures. We also elected to leave the hardtops standard 3.42 rear gear in place. We knew that if we installed the coupes standard 3.15 gear that we could gain 5-6 mph on the top end run but again the goal was real world numbers.

Doug gives last minute instructions for Don to turn the Trans/Diff cooling pumps and the Accusump system on for the high speed run.

This test also gave us the perfect opportunity to test our Heat Extractor Hood at speeds up to 190mph. Our previous testing was done at Road America at 150mph. We are pleased to say that no buckling of the hood occurred and everything was stable up to our 190mph top speed. We also tested our soon to be released "re-directing" brake duct system and it too withstood the 190mph wind blast. Our final test was with our new wing that is designed to clean up the air turbulence on the rear deck. It worked flawlessly and helped keep the car as stable at a rock!

Here is our new "removable" rear wing which is held on with special double sided tape good for over 190mph and adds downforce without drag at speeds over 90mph.

We first stopped off at TRC, the Transportation and Research Center in East Liberty, Ohio. There they have a 7 mile test track that allowed our supercar to hit its top speed. Our car averaged 190.20 mile per our with cross winds ranging from 8-15mph. Not bad for a Hardtop Corvette with a Coefficient of drag of .31 compared to the coupes .29. That would be good for 3-5 mph more. It should be noted that we didn't even tape up the front end or remove the mirrors which would have given us much better numbers!

After TRC we all trekked up to the Chrysler Proving Grounds near Detroit Michigan for some straight line testing.

Our first pass at 190.2mph. Notice how low the car sits when its at speed due to the downforce.

Even with everything set just the way a customer takes delivery of his car the results were utterly fantastic!

Skidpad results:
Even with our built-in mild understeer we where able to hit 1.0 g's on the KD street tires! With minor changes to ride height we have obtained 1.06g's on the same street tires and well over 1.1g's on race rubber!

Quarter Mile results:
Our quarter mile test was performed on a cement straight away that had no rubber previously laid down and our tire pressures were 39psi front and 37 psi rear. Again, street KD BFG tires were used. Our official time was 12.4 sec @ 118mph. With Drag radials on a drag strip we have seen times as low as 11.7 @ 121mph.

0 to 60mph results:
No changes were made to the car for this test. The best time on street tires was 4.1 seconds. On soft compound tires expect times at 3.9 sec. or better.

Top speed for the Fixed Roof Coupe Version:
190 miles per hour! As a foot note the speedometer was dead on accurate as Don reported the same time as the radar gun did. Expect speeds as high as 200mph with better wind conditions and with the slipperier coupe version.

For information on our C500/RSR car click here.