March 7, 2008--Some Corvettes can scare the beejeebers out of you.

For some folks, that includes ones built with more power available at the touch of the go-pedal than they’ve ever experienced. For some long-time Vette lovers, the new Z06s and ZR1s, with 500+ horsepower under their hoods may be in the scary zone when it comes to them driving one while their 283-powered C1 pride and joy waits nearby. But that doesn’t stop more than a few of those same folks from standing by the fence on Track Day, waiting to hear later-model cars zoom past with their engines revving through the fat part of their torque curve with their exhausts at full song, just as excited when that happens as a young kid on his first trip to a race track.

For Corvettes built for the quarter-mile, improvements in chassis materials and technology mean that early-generation Vettes, especially C1s and C2s, can be built with mega-monstrous engines between their front wheels and not have their frames pretzelize or break apart at speed because they’re loaded with more torque than they were designed to handle.

That’s especially helpful in the early Vettes whose relatively-short wheelbases (compared to other cars that race on the quarter mile)can make them handle like the most-wicked AA/Fuel Altereds if the chassis isn’t built and/or dialed in right. There’s also the matter of the C2’s aerodynamics, of which Zora Arkus-Duntov is reported to have said that they come very close to making the Sting Ray a lousy airplane.

It’s one thing to see a race driver like Mike Boyd wrestle an AA/FA legend like the Winged Express down the quarter-mile, with the car moving around more on that trip down the strip than a World of Outlaws car does during a lap on a dirt oval. He’s driven that screamer for many a year, succeeding the late, great Willie Borsch in that (often sideways) seat, and he’s had plenty of experience in that car over the last decade-plus. Experience that keeps the crowds at nostalgia-drags events on their feet whenever he runs!

Similar experience, at least when it comes to car building, was evident in an archive story that Alan Colvin passed along to me not long ago. It spotlighted what was then (April, 2001) “Ohio’s Fastest Street Car,” a ’65 Sting Ray coupe, owned and built by Gary Box, that had an NHRA-legal, chromemoly tube frame and roll cage built inside the body. That went in before the bored-and-stroked, 588-inch Mark IV big block running 14:1 compression and a radical Crower mechanical roller cam went in, and before the Holley Pro Dominator tunnel ram with two 1050 cfm Dominators and a Nitrous Oxide Systems’ Pro Shot Fogger nitrous oxide injection system went on.

Alan said that he rode in that car about three years ago, and after a couple of mind-numbing passes on the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, he vowed to never sit in that Vette again. The car was just “scary.”

That piece went on to describe how that Vette earned its title at “Ohio’s Fastest Street Car Shootout”  race at Norwalk (Ohio) Raceway Park, first by passing a detailed safety/required-legal-equipment exam by the Ohio State Highway Patrol, then by defeating all comers while running consistent 8.10-8.20-second times in the quarter, with only a 150-shot of nitrous . (The article said that with the Pro Fogger system set to “kill,” that car ran in the 7.70s at 170 miles an hour.) You can see that C2 on the web at Box’ website, www.boxperformance.com/mycar/htm.

That’s some serious acceleration, especially for a street legal car on a modern strip like Norwalk’s. Some might even say scary.

But that’s not as scary as someone who’s over their head on a public road in any Vette. It could be a newbie with a just-purchased Z06, who’s not familiar with how quickly a new Corvette reacts to steering and (especially) throttle inputs. It could be someone who’s just got their restored L71-powered midyear out of storage, and they’re still in winter-daily-driver mode, not having driven their C2 in over six months. Or, it could be anyone who realizes (too late) that they’re not going to make the turn they’re now in the middle of, and the best hope they have is to walk away from something that’ll become a parts car in the blink of an eye.

Now, that’s scary.