Features

I feel like I've been tipped off the top of the Cresta Run. On rollerblades. And I'm blindfolded. Holy cow, this is scary. To clarify the situation, let's look at the issues.

One: the track I'm on, which is full of closing-radius sphincter-tightening corners, treacherous cambers, conniving double-apex curves and, most of all, blind traps that jump up at you from behind crests.

Issue two, the car. In the Corvette ZR1, we've got 638bhp, in a machine that weighs just 1,518kg fully fuelled and optioned. That's Enzo Ferrari territory.

I don't know the car, and I don't know the track. That combination is so intimidating, I feel like I've about 1,500bhp under my toe.

My first tickle had the rear tyres spinning up in second gear, in a straight line, with the ESP and traction control fully on.

"Oh, it'll do that," chief engineer Tadge Jeuchter told me later, showing only a slightly evil grin. It cuts in only when the car gets properly sideways. And that's in full-nanny mode: after that, there's a 'competitive driving' mode (I'll not deploy that, because I'm not competitive). And then an 'off' mode. If I used that too soon in the learning curve, I would indeed be off.

I'm not saying the ZR1 is dangerous. Far from it. After a few laps, I feel more comfortable. Comfortable? Hmmm, maybe not. Lightning-bolt alert, doing what I can to stay with a car that'll do 0-60 in 3.4 seconds, top out at 205mph and corner at 1g-plus.

More than that, it's gradually apparent that the handling is pretty damned sublime. That, and the brakes, and the grip.

Right, make no mistake. What we have here is one of the truly great supercars. Bragging rights ahoy: the ZR1 currently holds the production car record for the Nürburgring.

Although it later becomes apparent on the road that it doesn't feel like one of those brittle, edgy, 'Ring-optimised cars. It's supple and useable.

"Yup," Jeuchter agrees. "Every time we went to the 'Ring and set it up, we'd drive home and find we hated it. So in the end we set it up, then just took it to the 'Ring and tweaked it."

But here's the issue. It's extremely hard to think of this as a hypercar. It's just a Corvette. Never mind the 335-section rear tyres, the blistered wings, the big front splitter, the window in the bonnet bulge, the visible carbon'fibre roof.

To those of us who live in Britain, and who don't see Vettes every day, it's easy to miss those things. So the ZR1 looks like the base Corvette, a car that costs about the same as a Cayman.

Which makes the ZR1's price - £100k, give or take - hard to swallow. It also feels ordinary, but in good ways: easy to drive in town, refined on the motorway, surprisingly supple-riding.

Until you floor it. Then it goes not like a Cayman, but like a Carrera GT. And it's sophisticated. Broadly speaking, a regular Vette consists of a steel frame clothed in fibre glass.

The hotter 7.0-litre Corvette Z06, the one we took to the Isle of Man, has that steel frame replaced by aluminium and magnesium. The ZR1 uses the light frame too, but for the skin the glass fibre is replaced by carbon fibre.

Most of it painted, but some of it lacquered for show, glinting thousands of tiny diffraction-rainbows in the summer sun.