The Pussycat That Roars

Although Detroit's automakers have designed and built every type of car imaginable in the past 90 years, they have never produced a world-class sports car that could match a Porsche or a Ferrari.

That may be changing. General Motors will roll out its $50,000 Corvette ZR1 in September, and the automotive trade press is already gushing about the car with the sort of enthusiasm it usually reserves for $150,000 European exotics. "We have finally driven the ZR1 Corvette," raves Automobile magazine. "And without equivocation we can pronounce it the fastest and finest high- performance automobile America has ever produced."

It is certainly fast. The car has a top speed of 180 m.p.h. and can go from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in a blistering 4.2 sec., making it the fastest factory-built car in the world. Moreover, the Corvette more than holds its own in road- hugging tests against the $75,000 Porsche 928GT and the $180,000 Ferrari Testarossa.

The soul of the new machine is a ferocious 380-h.p. V-8 engine that experts say is the most sophisticated ever built. The aluminum-alloy engine boasts 32 valves, four for each cylinder, and an innovative air-intake system that can sip oxygen from a single narrow throttle valve or suck it full blast from a wide-mouth intake, depending on how sharply the driver presses the pedal to the metal. Other high-tech bells and whistles include a slick six-speed computer-assisted manual transmission and a suspension system that automatically adjusts shock absorbers to the speed of the car.

The bad news for parking-lot jockeys dreaming about taking the new Vette for a joyride is that the car comes equipped with a so-called valet key feature. When the driver switches it on before leaving his prize in an attendant's hands, half the engine's valves shut down. That turns one mean machine into a pussycat.

Anyone wishing to buy a ZR1 anytime soon may be out of luck. Chevy plans to build only 4,000 in the 1990 model-year, and most of those have been reserved. "If you don't have an order in by now," says dealer Matthew Williams of Jack Cauley Chevrolet in West Bloomfield, Mich., "you probably won't be able to get one."