Kinglake is still recovering from Black Saturday. Some 16 years after a wall of flame devastated the town, accounting for 40 of the 173 fatalities on that terrible February day, the community has done its best to bounce back. More than half the population left in the wake of the fires which – given that 630 of the 760 houses were destroyed – is a testament to the resilience of those that stayed and rebuilt.
I’ve just arrived in the Corvette E-Ray, awaiting photographer Ellen Dewar. It’s still early but the day is shaping up to be a scorcher, with the mercury set to soar into the 40s. Thankfully it’s not going to be windy. At this hour, it feels as if the town is barely ticking over. The Songbird Cafe is still closed, but even at 8am there’s already an oppressive thickness to the still air, tradies arriving at the supermarket with sweat stains down their backs.
“What’s that then, a Ferrari?” ventures one, as he catches sight of the white coupe, with its obviously mid-engined shape. When told that it’s a new hybrid Corvette with all-wheel drive, he struggles to take in that little lot. It’s easy to understand why. The Vette made its name on the basis of rugged simplicity. You got a glass-fibre body, a big engine up front and drive went to a fat pair of rear treads. The right stuff. That was about it. Anything beyond that was almost sacrilegious.
The C8 version changed all that. In truth, the formula had probably about run its course. In order to level with the world’s better junior supercars, an engine at the front and power going to the other end has its limitations. The E-Ray uses its technology in an interesting fashion. Unlike many of its new hybrid siblings, it doesn’t wield its electrically-assisted powertrain to game emissions regulations. It does so in order to make the car faster and more exciting. Whether that’s an enduring strategy is something to chew over at another time, but it’s certainly effective.
Dewar arrives and we leave Kinglake, heading east towards Castella. The forests have recovered, but the outskirts of town still have empty plots like missing teeth that have never been built upon. Perhaps in some places the bushfire risk is still too high. One local I spoke to claimed that the understory of vegetation was thicker than it was on Black Saturday. “It’s a case of when, not if,” he says, referring to the likelihood of another town-threatening blaze. “The difference now is that we know how bad it can be and we’ll get out fast.”
As we transit out of the woods and into the more open terrain up towards Murrindindi, it’s clear quite how dry the summer has been. The paddocks and rolling hills are a sullen dun colour, cattle scratching at the dust. The Vette’s a good companion on these loping sections. I’ve taken to switching the car into its customisable ‘Zora’ mode, which gives instant access to steering, suspension, engine, exhaust, braking and stability control sliders.
The magnetorheological dampers are in their lazy-boy setting right now and although there’s little they can do to dampen the thwack of the massive 345/25 ZR21 rear Michelins on surface imperfections, at least they’re ironing out a lot of the high-frequency chatter. If there was a bit more interior storage space, this could work as a long-legged GT car. With 345 litres between the front and rear luggage bays, it’s even halfway practical. It’s not hugely economical, but a little indicator light on the dash illuminates when the cylinder deactivation mode kicks in, whereupon you’re driving a 3.1-litre V4. Best not to dwell too long on that. It’s just weird.
Accommodation inside is good. I’m 194cm tall and I’m not too bad a fit, my hair just tickling the Alcantara headlining. The driver’s seat has electrically adjustable side bolsters, but the passenger doesn’t. I think the E-Ray dislikes its passenger. They get no storage for anything, not even a little pouch or net. Even the central bin is side-hinged to open towards the driver and, for the passenger, the cup holders are a reach over the faintly ridiculous 20-button HVAC central spar. Some of the ergonomics are decidedly odd. I search in vain for a way to kill the lane-keep assist, only to consult the manual and realise it’s on the header rail above the rear-view mirror. I hold the button to switch it out, only for an angry bloke in a Hilux to razz me up, thinking I was giving him the bird.
Murrindindi is a quiet location for some photography, but even here with sparse smallholdings dotted way back from the road, you’re aware of quite how loud the E-Ray is when you open the taps. I snuck away from my house in Stealth Mode at 6am that morning, the 19.kWh battery netting you an optimistic-sounding six kilometres of front-wheel drive silent running. Well, that’s the theory at least. Should you do anything vaguely morning-like, such as try to switch on the air conditioning, give the screen a wipe or just look at it funny, it’ll fire the 6.2-litre V8 up with a sharp bark. Didn’t that just wipe the smug right off my face. Mind you, the transition sound from electric to internal combustion is very cool, almost like a Le Mans hypercar pulling out of its pit box on electric power with the engine firing in hard.
The E-Ray likes to flex its vocal cords here and there. It never rises to anything operatic like a flat-plane Ferrari V8, but it bellows convincingly, in an appealingly old-school overhead-valve fashion. That’s if you’ve taken control of the carbon-fibre paddle shifters yourself. Leave the computer to take care of things and all too often you find that it’s plugged you into far too high a gear and you’re trying to wrangle throttle authority mid-corner with the engine barely ticking over, even in the racier drive modes. That needs work for the facelift. Keep on top of things yourself and you’re golden.
It’s crushingly rapid too. We saw an easy and repeatable 0-100km/h in 2.5 seconds at Sandown race track on our first encounter with the E-Ray, helped by the burnout mode which allows you to temporarily deactivate the front axle to spin up the rears and net some tyre temperature. Out on public roads it’s easy for the devil to become very comfortable on your shoulder. The small matter of 488KW and a massive 806Nm will do that for you. Compare that to the 475kW and 550Nm of its LT6-powered circuit warrior sibling, the Z06, and you get some idea of the E-Ray’s potency. You become slightly lulled due to the massive amount of grip at your disposal, and as a result it’s easy to find yourself covering ground at inadvisable speeds. Fortunately there’s a great head-up display that emblazons any potentially licence-losing velocity front and centre.
Find a legal location and 0-400m will disappear in 10.4 seconds, which is lineball with a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ, a McLaren 720S or a Ferrari 812 Superfast: genuine supercar royalty right there. So you’ll never be found wanting for outright go. At this point it’s worth considering the asking price too. At an RRP of $275,000, the E-Ray carries an $85,000 premium over the Stingray 3LT coupe, but that’s money well spent.
The hybrid drivetrain is, as you might hope from General Motors, rugged and relatively simple. The internal combustion engine takes care of the rear wheels, its 369kW/637Nm being fed through a Tremec TR-9080 eight-speed dual clutch transmission. The electric motor looks after the front treads. The compact battery pack is housed in the central tunnel and feeds the 119kW/169Nm permanent magnet synchronous motor. Clever software balances the way the E-Ray ladles out power to front and rear. Burnout mode aside, the only way to deliver a full rear-wheel drive experience is to travel faster than 250km/h.
As well as the hybrid drivetrain, the styling is transformed for the better too. Remember the slightly underwhelming look of the Stingray’s rear end, almost as if it needed some wheel spacers? The E-Ray shares the Z06’s wide body, with broad gaping side intakes giving it a far more aggressive stance. Once you see the way the fuel filler cap, the intake and the curved haunch visually interact though, you’ll forever be reminded of a happy salmon. At the back are a set of interchangeable fixed flics for the rear spoiler. GMSV also supply a smaller set if you’d prefer a more low-key look.
That asking price also includes the track-ready ZER pack, huge carbon-ceramic brakes, a carbon-fibre and leather trimmed steering wheel, and a beefier wheel and tyre set. Unlike the last Stingray we drove, this E-Ray has been beautifully specified too. The stormtrooper white with black details gets just a pop of colour from the matching yellow brake calipers and seatbelts. Hat tip to whoever was driving the configurator for BSM404.
Photo duties at Murrindindi over, we head towards the charmingly named Break Oday Road at Glenburn. We pause for a moment at the junction with the Melba Highway to kick around in the old parking lot of the ill-starred Glenburn Hotel. This was owned by F1 racer Alan Jones back in the early 1980s but it was another victim of the terrible fires of February 2009. Owners Ronnie and Howard Batterham then had such a protracted insurance wrangle with Lloyds of London that by the time they were in a position to rebuild, council rezoning rules had changed and the plot has stood empty ever since. The water tank is the sole surviving remnant of this once-thriving country pub.
Break Oday Road meanders lazily along towards Flowerdale at the headwaters of the Goulburn River. It’s cow country out here, but right now all the cattle is being fed from hayricks, the impoverished paddocks in desperate need of rain. I try to take stock of what I like about this Corvette, which is a lot, and those parts I don’t. Of the latter, the excessive HVAC strip is one, but that’s rumoured to be due for the chop with the next C8 facelift. The front lift kit is fast, effective and quite noisy, but the button is right next to the ESC off button, which could be problematic if you fat-finger the wrong one. I’d also like the steering to be a little more communicative. When you switch it into a more aggressive drive mode, the response can become a bit gluey. The silent e-mode is unable to be selected if the engine is running – a bit of a missed opportunity.
Above all, I’m just blown away by this car’s sheer depth of capability. Were your pockets adequately deep, you could happily daily drive this. Heck, you could throw a roofbox on it, chuck your skis inside and take it to the snow, were you so minded. It would be just one more driving scenario the E-Ray would happily just shrug and get on with. As I ponder this prospect, it dawns on me that we haven’t stopped for lunch. Flowerdale isn’t delivering on that front, because everything seems to be closed. We tool on to Strath Creek, where everything is also closed. Pro tip: if you come out this way, BYO refreshments, otherwise you could be faced with a hangry photographer.
Just out of Strath Creek is a stretch of road that’s indelibly etched into Wheels’ road testing history. The ‘Broadford Bends’ climb sharply up a scarp slope to Murchison Lookout and have featured in road tests going back decades. Virtually every road tester has a story to tell about some escapade or other at this challenging series of corners, and the battered guardrails bear testament to those with an excess of enthusiasm and a shortfall of talent.
Punting the E-Ray up the sharp gradient puts a heavy demand on the powertrain and the e-motor up front starts a high-pitched keening. It’s like a supercharger whine, and it’s reminiscent of an old Jaguar XKR, which is certainly no bad thing. So consistent was the sound signature though, that I began to wonder whether this was a symposed sound being piped through the speakers. Turns out it was. How ironic it would have been if the electric part of this car gave it the aural drama that the internal combustion engine lacks in its upper registers. Nice story, not supported by facts, unfortunately.
Grip on turn-in is mighty, and you start to take liberties with just how early you can feed in throttle. There’s a small but reassuring measure of roll in the chassis that communicates clearly where the limit of grip resides. In a bid to upset the car, I come into one tightening radius corner and lift sharply. The nose tucks in, and the stability control light gives a flicker, but that’s the extent of the drama. As I start to ease out the stability control assistance in Zora mode, the car gets progressively livelier, but never exhibits the sort of spikiness you might expect from something foursquare, mid-engined and rolling on serious rubber. It’s all very malleable but you need accurate hands and, as I mentioned earlier, the steering doesn’t always deliver the most articulate clues.
No complaints about the braking power though. The huge carbon ceramic discs (398mm up front and 391mm at the rear) shuck off the 1776kg kerb weight with ease, and the handover from friction braking to re-gen is well handled. The pedal feel is odd, with a gentle initial travel, firming sharply from there. Modulating the brake takes a little getting used to, but once your muscle memory has hard-wired the short pedal travel, it’s no great issue. The bright yellow six-pot Brembo front stoppers look the goods too, peeking through the black alloys.
Perhaps the trickiest thing about the E-Ray is keying into its personality. There’s no doubting its capability, but it diverges so far from the traditional Corvette template that you find yourself transposing the feel of other cars onto it. At times it’s reminiscent of the ‘new’ NC-gen Honda NSX, another mid-engined all-wheel drive hybrid designed with the US market front of mind. At others, it’s a discount Lamborghini Temerario.
Track time. We roll through the gates of the State Motorcycle Sports Complex near Broadford, a fierce little circuit that ought to be a test for the power-down of this otherwise unflappable coupe. Dial the stability control down to zero and you feel a torque response from the front axle as the e-motor ramps quickly to full power. It’s not the feel of torque steer or a bitey diff, it’s something strange and different, almost as if the tyres are tramlining. Trail brake in and it’ll swing the rear controllably. It’s a well-sorted thing, but only when you start flinging it about a bit do you feel its weight. Best of all, it gives you options. It’s easy to get the car moving around, but the drive from the front axle always gives you the get-out-of-jail-free card to pull you out of what seems like unrecoverable yaw gain.
One particularly cool feature is the Performance Data Recorder. Even if you’re not given to driving on track, the PDR can act as an inbuilt high-definition dashcam, recording to an SD card. It’s on track that it really comes into its own though. As well as recording video of your lap, there’s an in-car microphone, GPS telemetry recorder, and because it’s hardwired you get all sorts of data such as throttle position, braking pressure, steering angle and so on.
The E-Ray emerges as a better road car than the angrier Z06. In fact, it’s comfortably the best roadgoing Corvette ever. If you were worried that the addition of electrification would neuter the Vette in some way, think again. It has managed to add several layers of additional talent to the basic Stingray package and does so with a blue-collar common sense that’s somehow very Corvette in its application.
While we’re not about to pretend that $275k is small change, in terms of the ability that the E-Ray delivers and how exploitable it is in accessing those reserves of talent, it’s a bargain. Given that the RRP for a 389kW/610Nm Porsche 911 Carrera 4 GTS t-hybrid coupe is in excess of $400k, the Corvette E-Ray becomes very difficult to look past.
Nobody is looking past it in Broadford, that’s for sure. The local kids are almost hyperventilating when it pulls up outside a cafe. In this quiet country town, it looks like something that has beamed in from another planet, but there’s an approachability that’d likely elude some blue-blooded Euro missile.
Yes, it is strong value for money in the wider concept, but don’t take that as a condescending pat on the head. The E-Ray absolutely stands up on its own right. Perhaps it’s time to retire the old stereotypes about American sports cars that are all firepower and no finesse. As Dewar packs her gear and heads back to Melbourne, there’s no hesitation. I’m retracing my steps. The long and winding route home has rarely looked so appealing.
