Car and Driver Feb 2002

CAR AND DRIVER Magazine
February 2002

Review Comments from Doug Rippie
Hello Corvette guys and gals. I hope you have read the article in the Feb issue of Car And Driver. It details the review of our C500/RSR and our 427 cu in LS1 upgrades to the C5 Corvettes. It is a well written article by Larry Webster and I would like to thank him and the folks at C&D for testing our newest creations from DRM.

As the space in the magazine is limited to tell everything about the RSR Supercar, I would like to go more in depth about this car.

General Overview:
It is extremely important to note that this car is NOT a drag racer. Although it does extremely well as one, that is not its purpose in life. This is a lay me down, balls to the wall ROAD RACER that you can race on the weekends and drive to work everyday of the week, rain or shine, -20º to 110º F, highway or city driving. That's a tall order for any tuner and we have accomplished that with flying colors! By the way, C&D managed 19mpg city driving, not bad for a 500hp emissions legal catalyst equipped "race car for the street"!

An explanation of the results:
Lets start with the 0-60 time. A blistering 3.9 seconds. That's as fast as a current 911 twin turbo and almost a full second faster than the stock coupe. Our only problem was traction ( we used full treat BFG street tires ). From 0-30 we had massive wheel spin. Remember this car is meant for high speed track events with its stiffer suspension, lots of wheel camber front and rear and a manual transmission. But still we managed an incredible time.

As for the quarter mile time of 12.2 well we have consistently managed 11.7 to 11.9 seconds on our customer cars. This car suffered slightly in this department because the cars owner Steve Melnick runs many track events throughout the summer as a Track Time© driving instructor. His car is setup with gobs and gobs of camber for optimum high speed cornering. This kills straight line traction off the line and tamed our results slightly. Still 12.2 seconds at 119mph "isn't bad at all"

Braking on this car is Eye popping! We managed 3 feet shorter that a Z06 Corvette when stopping from 70mph. But lets get real for a moment. Stopping from that speed is really a function of the tire compound and width and road surface. The REAL test of this car is stopping repeatedly from 150mph 25 times in a row with no brake fade! That's what this car can do, can you find a stock C5 that can do it?....not a chance.

As for the Skid pad results a .97 is great. But again I must emphasize that the car was set up for high speed road course driving and it is designed to push or understear slightly. This is safe and controllable for track driving but hurts skip pad results slightly. When we set a car up for mostly street driving you can expect 1.1g in this area. BFGoodrich tested our coil over suspension setup with the KD series street tires and managed 1.06g's on their skippad test. So as the saying goes "results may vary' but either way we have a very potent handling car.

The top speed of this car is actually 195 to 200mph. Last year Car And Driver tested our 1999 Hardtop with a similar engine and gearing and managed 190mph at TRC proving grounds in Ohio. Although this car was not tested we estimate that this slipperier coupe would better that by 5 or 10 mph.

The nuts and bolts:
I would like to give you a overview of what you get for an extra $40,000 for this conversion. None of our other competitor can even come close to what you get in performance upgrades and appearance items.
First the engine. Completely rebuilt using only the finest of components including Z06 heads, new pistons, rods, crank, valve springs, bearings, headers, Tri Flow exhaust system, performance breather system, and computer programming
The braking system not only includes 6-piston front and 4-piston rear calipers but also includes 14" rotors with aluminum hats all around, specially designed front brake cooling ducts, stainless steel braided lines and a high performance master cylinder.
The suspension system includes adjustable coil -over shocks and springs, heavy duty sway bars, polyurethane bushings and custom alignment.
A chassis stiffener is included for safety and performance along with a 6-point harness system for the driver and passenger.
Extensive cooling is managed by the addition of a ultra high capacity radiator with a built in engine oil cooler. A transmission cooler and a differential cooler are added along with Z06 side vents to house the coolers and direct air to them.
Finally a set of HRE or Fikse Aluminum wheels with a DRM "heat extractor hood" will set this car off from the rest of the crowd.

For information on our C500/RSR car click here.