When it comes to current performance car bargains, it’s hard to beat the new Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport. Packing pretty much almost all the performance hardware of the madcap Corvette Z06 except for its supercharged 650-horsepower V-8, the Grand Sport has proven itself every bit capable of taking on sports cars that cost two or three times as much. And apparently, that list of high-performance metal includes the Porsche 911 GT3 RS.
That’s according to the sports car-testing impresarios at German car magazine Sport Auto. Widely known for their ability to squeeze independent Nurburgring lap times out of some of the world’s coolest automobiles, the magazine also runs cars around the German Formula One track at Hockenheim known as the Hockenheimring.
In the hands of the magazine’s test driver, the Corvette Grand Sport ripped around Hockenheim’s short track in one minute and 8.7 seconds. In the words of the magazine, “Fast so schnell wie ein GT3 RS!” Which according to our friends at Google Translate, means the car is “almost as fast as a GT3 RS!” Indeed, that car ran around the same course in one minute and 8.5 seconds in the magazine’s hands—just two blinks faster than the less-powerful Corvette.
That lap time also means the Grand Sport is almost a full second quicker around the course than the Porsche 911 GT3, according to Sport Auto’s 2013 test of that particular ass-engined Nazi rocket sled.
And beyond being a chance to see GM’s speed machine run neck-and-neck with Porsches against the clock, the video is an excuse to watch a red-white-and-blue Corvette Grand Sport slaughter a German racetrack, complete with a pounding smallblock V-8 soundtrack. Which is a little piece of Americana we’ll never tire of.
