28 10BEST FOR 2020 PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX BERNSTEIN ~ JANUARY 2020 ~ CAR AND DRIVER
The mid-engine Chevrolet
Corvette Stingray is ready to
reclaim California.If you’re old enough to remember when
California was the land of Corvettes, you’re
probably worried about the size of your
prostate. In the 1960s, Corvettes were as
much a part of the California dream as sun-
shine, beaches, and bikinis. Surf bands, like
Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys, topped the
charts by selling the world an idealized West
Coast lifestyle, a utopia where fuel-injected
Stingrays raced Jaguar E-types from Sunset
and Vine all the way to Dead Man’s Curve.
And all the Jag could see were the Stingray’s
round taillights.
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the Corvette lasted well into the 1970s,
but as the state’s baby boomers aged and
became more sophisticated, they moved
on from America’s sports car in droves.
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faster machines from Japan and Germany,
including the turbocharged iterations of the
Toyota Supra , Ma zda RX-7, Nissan 300ZX,
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Golden State, the Porsche 911.
In fact, Porsche’s stranglehold on Cali-
fornia’s sports-car market is so strong, the
swanky Orange County enclave of Newport
Beach has been nicknamed New “Porsh”
Beach: 911s are every where.
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piercing round. A bunker buster. The 2020
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good enough to reclaim California from
the grip of the imported sports car. Mov-
ing its engine to the middle has not only
taken its performance to new heights, but
the sports car’s image has been catapulted
from mouth-breathing, tire-smoking semi–
muscle car to supercar disrupter in a single
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early 1970s without the baggage and stigma
of its past indiscretions, a lineage that has
included everything from leaky T-tops to
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life, the Corvette isn’t an old man’s car. Yes, it
still has a pushrod V-8 for now, but its 490 -hp
(the $1195 performance exhaust takes that up to
495) 6.2-liter V-8 and quick-shifting eight-speed
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And when equipped with the $5000 Z51 Perform-
ance package (which includes the optional
exhaust), this rear-wheel-drive machine’s
launch control makes the most of having 60.6
percent of its weight on the rear rubber. It gets
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Z51 shoots to 60 mph in 2.8 seconds and through
the quarter-mile in 11.2 seconds at 122 mph. It
even betters the 60 -mph runs of the quickest
650-hp C 7 Z06 and 755-hpC 7 ZR1, both of whichFrom the South Bay
to the Valley, from
the West Side to the
East Side, everybody’s
very happy about
the new Corvette.California
Dreamin’