The Spirit of Detroit: 1967 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray 427 vs. 2015 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Convertible (2024)

From the July 2015 issue

A 1967 Corvette Sting Ray is our time machine for visiting the era when America and Car and Driver came of age. The 1960s marked the arrival of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Stones—not to mention modern birth control, space travel, and draft-card burning—so it’s no wonder this nation’s psyche was irrevocably twisted. C/D contributed to the chaos by penetrating the DMZ separating import worshippers from domestic-car enthusiasts. After a Pontiac Tempest GTO “beat” a Ferrari 250GTO in our March 1964 “comparison test,” the bar fights advanced to DEFCON 3.

Fifty years ago, GM was king. Accountants fudged prices to ensure that market share didn’t top 50 percent, thereby avoiding trustbusters, while GM’s designers and engineers created everything from $2000 Chevy Corvairs to $11,000 Cadillac Fleetwoods. The ’60s began with the General’s attempt to build a better Beetle in said Corvair, and the company gained momentum with turbochargers, aluminum-block V-8s, muscle cars, and a 7.7-liter front-drive Cadillac Eldorado untarnished by torque steer. Engineers and designers were free to dream from within GM’s breathtaking, Eero Saarinen–designed Tech Center in Warren, Michigan. With no import ­worries or fear that Chrysler or Ford might catch up, GM played intramural scrimmage among its six divisions.

Today GM is recuperating nicely from bankruptcy. It ranks seventh on the Fortune 500 list, six slots below Walmart. Setting aside Sam’s house of Chinese-made recyclables, the apple of every consumer’s eye is, well, Apple, two slots above GM in the pecking order. Possibly as a result of subliminal mind control, Apple has succeeded GM as the purveyor of toys and tools essential to modern life. Apple might even enter the car business if its Titan project matures. We’ll fret over that later. Today, we’re staging one 1967 Corvette 427 and one 2015 Corvette Z06 on the Motor City’s main drag, Woodward Avenue, for the street race of the ages.

Corvettes thrived in the ’60s as America’s middle-finger salute to the Jaguar E-type, Mercedes SL, and Porsche 911. What Detroit V-8s lacked in camshafts, they made up for with exhaust cackle and more than enough power to rout uppity imports.

We picked the ’67 Sting Ray not only because it was the pride of the GM fleet in its day, but also because we had one handy. Twenty years ago, your author rescued this car from beater status and restored it to its current glory in the privacy of his garage.

Vette fans hold the so-called “midyear” models (1963–67, or C2) in high esteem because that was when Corvettes became world-class sports cars. Patron saint Zora Arkus-Duntov hoped for a rear-mounted transaxle as part of the heroic 1963 redesign. That dream was postponed for 34 years, but he was able to bless C2s with independent rear suspensions, big-block engines, disc brakes, and side exhaust pipes. The new-for-1963 Z06 option code expedited race prep with a 36-gallon fuel tank, a 360-hp fuel-injected small-block V-8, knockoff aluminum wheels, and a limited-slip differential.

The ’67 Corvette Sting Ray was basically a stand-in when the Shark-era third-generation Corvette suffered engineering and production delays. Caught unprepared for another year of the C2, GM styling left the ’67s minimally adorned because there wasn’t time to make fresh jewelry.

This 427 roadster left the St. Louis factory powered by the L71 three-carburetor, 435-hp V-8 but rolled out of its restoration bay in slightly altered form, largely because the original driveline had been sacrificed to the drag strip. Its rebirth brought aluminum cylinder heads (a $369 option in 1967) and a fresh 427 block. Without power-assisted steering or brakes, the aluminum cylinder heads’ 150-pound weight savings is hugely valuable. A factory high-rise intake manifold hosting a single Holley four-barrel carburetor fed by a cold-air-induction hood mimics the hottest Vettes of the day, the exotic 427 L88s (hence the tribute license plate). Only 20 of those factory racers were sold in 1967; originals command $3 million and up.

In the dozen Reader’s Choice polls Car and Driver conducted from 1964 through 1975, Corvettes won our Best All-Around Car or Best Value award 10 times. But, as with GM as a whole, the car fumbled through the ’70s and base-engine output dropped to an embarrassing 165 horsepower. Enthusiasm also flagged when Arkus-Duntov’s second-generation chassis remained largely unchanged for the C3, a 20-year life span. Storm clouds formed a third time in 1992, when funds to engineer a fifth-generation Corvette weren’t available through normal channels. To safeguard the sports car from extinction, Chevy general manager Jim Perkins had to shuffle $2.5 million from his marketing budget to sustain the Corvette engineering program.

Today, with GM back on track, the Corvette Z06 has resumed its traditional role of import-ass-kicker. An Eaton supercharger and two heat exchangers crammed into the intake manifold force-feed a 6.2-liter small-block with up to 9.4 psi of chilled air, yielding 650 horsepower. That’s the largest herd of ponies GM has ever wrangled into any production car. Ignoring the industry switch from gross to net ratings in the 1970s, that’s a 49-percent increase in peak power since 1967. Factor in the safety advancements, emissions controls, and creature comforts added through the years, and the result is a curb weight up by nearly 500 pounds. But there’s also a nearly threefold increase in rear tire width—from the 1967’s 7.75-15 Firestone bias-plies to today’s P335/25ZR-20 Michelin Pilot Super Sport ZP radials, on wheels exactly twice as wide.

Both Corvettes excel at embossing rubber onto pavement. The rowdy ’67 lights them up with every first-gear full-throttle indulgence, leaving two skinny squiggles for a signature. Suspension and differential advancements enable the Z06 to securely hold its assigned launch path, so its asphalt scars are deeper, wider, straighter, and longer. That said, it takes a brave soul to hold the throttle down with stability aids disabled on wet pavement.

In 1967, the Corvette 427 was one of the quickest production cars C/D had ever tested, topped only by Shelby Cobras. With two aboard (a passenger was needed to click the stopwatches back then), one coupe clocked 4.7 seconds to 60 mph and 13.6 seconds at 105 mph in the quarter-mile. That quarter run is more than two seconds and 22 mph slower than the Z06 tested here. So, after the new Corvette humbles its forebear during a few playful stoplight sprints, our battle of the decades switches to ceremonial hot laps between Detroit and Pontiac.

Michigan Highway 1, or Woodward Avenue, vectors northwest out of the city and into suburbia, forming part of the old pre-interstate link to Pontiac, Flint, and Saginaw, other Michigan towns important to GM history. A mecca for muscle-car enthusiasts, the street hosts 30,000 cars and more than a million spectators for the annual Woodward Dream Cruise held on the third Saturday in August, when the avenue becomes a 16-mile-long parking lot jammed with overheated muscle machines, twitching street rods, and minivan-borne gawkers.

In the 1960s, Henry Ford’s massive Model T plant on Woodward in Highland Park still produced military vehicles. Chrysler HQ sat a few blocks away, and the Mopar skunkworks was housed in a former Pontiac dealership. Cars created by day at Chrysler’s Woodward garage defended Mopar’s street-racing honor by night in the hands of skilled operatives. One hallowed survivor of the era is a ’67 Plymouth Belvedere GTX known as the ­Silver Bullet. Bob Seger’s band is said to be named after it. The Bullet boasted a curb weight trimmed by 500 pounds and an 8.0-liter Hemi fed by two four-barrels delivering an easy 650 horsepower through the mufflers. Rolling on drag slicks, it still runs the quarter in the low 10s at 132 mph. Imagine pulling up in your Chevelle SS396 and watching this stock-looking GTX loft its front tires when the light turns green.

Downtown Detroit was an entertainment capital offering 24-hour bowling alleys, hundreds of gin joints, and some of America’s most ornate performing-arts ­theaters. In Midtown Detroit, on Grand Boulevard near Woodward, sat GM’s Albert Kahn–designed headquarters. On the top, two sets of 13-foot neon letters beamed GENERAL MOTORS across the land. But in the wee hours of July 23, 1967, Detroit changed forever. A police raid on a blind pig that was just over a mile from GM’s offices triggered a riot resulting in 43 deaths, 1189 injuries, 7200 arrests, and the destruction of 2000 buildings. It was the third race riot in the city’s history and by far its worst. Restoring order required city, county, and state police, National Guard tanks, and paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne.

In 1994, Coleman Young, Detroit’s first African-American mayor, summed up the destruction of his city once known as the Paris of the West: “Detroit’s losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totaling 22,000 in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic.”

Urban flight continued until recently, contributing to the city’s 2013 bankruptcy. While GM’s trip through the financial wringer lasted only five weeks, Detroit’s took 17 months, in part because it was the largest city by far ever to declare bankruptcy. But, finally, a hopeful mood is emerging thanks to the efforts of Roger Penske, Mike Ilitch (Little Caesars pizza), the Ford family, Dan Gilbert (Quicken Loans), and many others. GM now occupies the Renaissance Center at the foot of Woodward, a cylindrical megalith built in the aftermath of the riots . . . by Ford. The art deco Fox Theatre, where Motown Records’s Martha Reeves sang “Jimmy Mack” the night the riots broke out, was restored to its original glory in 1988. A $200 million investment brought the Neo-Renaissance–style Book-Cadillac hotel back to life in 2008. In the last six years, $150 million in federal funds has been spent clearing blight. Locavore restaurants are opening at a dizzying pace. Artists are flocking in, priced out of Brooklyn. And shovels have broken ground for the third pro-sports stadium to be located downtown.

About halfway up Woodward is Berkley’s Vinsetta Garage. After repairing cars for 90 years—starting before Woodward was paved, surviving to become the longest-operating repair shop east of the Mississippi—Vinsetta closed its doors and reopened, in 2012, as a restaurant. It preserves the mood of the original shop while adding the best duck burgers and mac and cheese in the area. Thank you, Curt Catallo and Ann Stevenson, for keeping an icon alive.

In Pontiac, at Woodward’s northern end, Brad Oleshansky is busy converting the 87-acre site of GM’s former truck and bus factory into high-end car condos. Scheduled to open next spring, the M1 Concourse will eventually include 250 climate-controlled garages, a 1.5-mile test track, a restaurant, retail shops, and lounge areas. Prices start at $115,000, and the Detroit area’s elite are flocking in. With the Motor City back up to speed with Hellcats, Camaro ZL1s, and Shelby Mustangs, the import-domestic debates (and street races) may now resume in earnest.

And then there is the new Z06, the modern Silver Bullet. The mightiest and best machine for cruising Woodward is now unmatched in its versatility. Twisting the co*ckpit’s mode-control knob through five positions gives you a 30-mpg (indicated), four-cylinder highway puss*cat at the low end, a ravenous track beast at the top, and a perfectly pleasant daily driver in between. It’s the supercar with a smile, thanks to its decent sound system, capable nav gear, and onboard weather forecasts. You can display your best moves in real time or save your hot laps on an SD card with the optional Performance Data Recorder.

It’s also a value. Converting the Z06’s performance stats to g’s—including its 3.3-second zero-to-60-mph acceleration, its 138-foot 70-to-zero braking, and its skidpad cornering—yields an equally weighted, bend-the-laws-of-physics average of 1.05 g’s. The same calculation for the Porsche 918 Spyder hypercar results in a 1.16-g index. So this $94,235 Corvette delivers 90 percent of the Porsche’s performance for a tenth of its price.

That said, it’s a little early for the Corvette engineering team to toast perfection. The Z06’s front tires trip over ­themselves in tight turning maneuvers, a fault attributable to steering geometry that is optimized for limit-cornering perform­ance at the expense of ordinary driving. And your incentive for dropping the top as soon as the ice melts is a ­convertible rear window you can barely see out of and a cabin redolent of the resin holding the fiberglass body together.

Speaking of that, on the final day of our Woodward photo mission, the two Vettes achieved perfect alignment at a stoplight with clear pavement ahead. So the 1967’s operator announced over the two-way that the one—and only one—street race for the camera was about to go down. When the light went green, the cautious driver in the Z06 fell far behind the 427.

What we missed was the unmarked cruiser lurking behind our photo car. Inevitably, the harsh lights of the law painted our scene in flickering red. But instead of stopping us to issue citations, the cop simply pulled next to our camera car to yell, “Stay in your vehicle!” at our photographer, who was poking out of the sunroof like General Patton heading for the Bulge. The officer then switched off his lights and took off in pursuit of other criminals. That, friends, is the true spirit of Detroit.