ERNews

Not too many cars make me nervous these days. A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport on narrow French country roads, maybe. Or a privately owned 1971 Porsche 911S museum piece—only because it’s privately owned. And any modern superbike, of course, like a Ducati with the power to weight ratio of a F1 race car, simply because of the imminent threat to loss of life and limbs. And yet, the night before Chevy set me loose at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in the new 1,064-horsepower Corvette ZR1 , the old butterflies started to set in. Nothing a brief afternoon session beforehand in a base Z51 Stingray couldn’t help, nor a few mezcal margaritas shortly thereafter—and yet, the prospect of unleashing hell from an unholy power plant built by General Motors just seemed hard to shake. Especially when a good friend and Pikes Peak record holder predicted I’d hit 190 miles per hour the next day. If so, that would be my new personal best, and by a wide margin. And a...