After borrowing a 2002 Corvette Z06 from GM for a few days, I have only one conclusion: I want one. For one thing, I’d love to be able to occasionally read the owner’s manual to get a respite from Atlas Shrugged, which I continue to wrestle with. As sophisticated as this car is, the owner’s manual is delightfully simple, and I could probably forget how to read and still enjoy it. I particularly like the section on why you should wear your seat belt, which shows a diagram of a guy in a moving seat hitting a pile of bricks, thus illustrating the idea that the seat will stop but you will keep going. If I’m ever in a speeding seat heading toward a pile of bricks, I certainly hope that I’m wearing a seat belt. As an aside, I guess the page entitled “Don’t park over things that burn,” didn’t really sink in (see picture below of ’Vette parked over things that burn).
    On to the car. The Z06 has 405 horsepower. To put that in perspective, 405 horsepower is five Honda Insights’ worth of juice. Since the Insight only gets three times better gas mileage, I figure the ’Vette makes a lot of sense. But if you want to drive an Insight, I fully encourage you. Somebody should be saving gas, what with me driving everywhere at 6000rpm in my Z06.

    It’s hard to behave yourself in this car. Considering that I once managed to get a speeding ticket in my father’s 1987 Dodge Ram, which could barely outdrag a 6-year-old girl on a Razor scooter, it is something of a miracle that my license survived the weekend in a car that goes 50mph in first gear (out of six). Sixty miles per hour arrives in around four seconds. Calling the Z06 “peppy” is like calling Bill Gates “upper middle class.” This thing takes off so hard that I was considering getting laser eye surgery to flatten my corneas, but instead I just merged onto the Mass. Pike at full throttle. Now I have 20-15 vision.
    The Z06 gets a lot of attention, particularly if you’re driving in rural areas, where the populace is not as inured to supercars as the crowd on Newbury Street. A gas station attendant in Lee, Mass., had many Z06 questions: “How much does it cost?” $50,000. “How fast does it go?” 170, so I’m told. And finally, “Light ’em up on your way out of here for me, willya?” I pondered this question for about three seconds. I came to this conclusion: If you are driving a car capable of spinning its tires on the 2-3 shift at 70mph, and you are challenged to do a burnout, and you decline, then you may as well buy a pink bathrobe and some fuzzy slippers and spend the remainder of your life watching QVC and looking expectantly in the mail for your copy of Crochet Quarterly. That said, immediately around the corner from the gas station was a cop with someone pulled over, and thus I had an excuse to avoid fishtailing back to Route 90 while still preserving my sizable machismo with a loud exit.
    Speaking of cops, that’s another kind of attention you’ll draw. Over the course of three days, I got clocked more often than Randy Johnson’s fastball. If I owned one of these, I might consider investing in one of those lead blankets you wear at the dentist, lest the constant radar blasts microwave my nether regions. I might also get a black one, so that every time I looked at it I wouldn’t get Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” stuck in my head. Which, trust me, becomes annoying fast.
    Besides that foible, I was also really disappointed with the Z06’s lack of interior storage spa—ow! Sorry, I just had to punch myself in the face for missing the point. Yes, the Z06 has a center console that can barely hold a wallet, along with a small, oddly shaped trunk. Depending on what they are, it might not have room for your priorities. You know what else? It only has one cup holder, and it’s so shallow it makes Mariah Carey look deep (sorry, you’ll need to pull over if you want to safely sip your Metamucil shake). What it does have is one other seat, which, to maximize the full capabilities of the vehicle, should be occupied at all times by a hottie.
    The final downside to the Corvette Z06 is that I have to give it back. Oh, well. Maybe I can just keep the owner’s manual. *