Can a Corvette ever truly be considered boring?
In a recent Corvette Forum thread, junior member jeffcardinalfan posits a question that some here might consider blasphemous. Jeff has had his 2007 C6 Corvette for a year, and he’s driven it over 6,000 miles, yet he’s finding the car somewhat boring to drive at legal speeds.
“I’m used to driving the older ones. They beat you to death, but you feel like you’re doing something,” writes Jeff.
He’s presumably referring to the C6’s higher handling limits and more composed driving stature. For sure, anyone who has become accustomed to driving a decades-old Corvettes will have a hard time acclimatizing to the relative comfort and roll-free driving experience of a newer Corvette. The interesting component of the question, however, is that Jeff wants to know if a C7 Corvette would be less “boring” than a C6.
Now, it’s important to talk about the specification of the car for a moment. Jeff’s C6 is equipped with an automatic transmission and a convertible top. This isn’t the most engaging Corvette ever built, but we’re still not sure it could really be called boring. When a Corvette is used in a boring manner — given a workaday life as a commuter-mobile, spending much of its time on arrow-straight roads in bumper-to-bumper traffic, or in low-limit speed zones — perhaps it could affect how an owner perceives the car. Perhaps the older cars are more engaging because they are ostensibly worse cars to drive? Driving a C6 at its limits is hardly boring, but that’s not something we can really do on public roads in a legal manner, can we?
What do you think? Is Jeff better off trading his C6 auto for a C6 with a 6-speed manual transmission? Would he be better off looking for a Grand Sport? Do you think a C7 is more dynamically engaging than a comparable C6?