My car is mod'd and I thought his car would do better. I launched off the line and each time put 2 cars on this guy by the time we were down the street. Each time was the same. I think those cars only have 400hp and this car seemed stock. He was trying, really trying. He wanted to go again and took off but I figure 3 times is enough.

 

nice kill...

 

Good Kill. 405 hp and they are fairly light.

 

I doubt doubt it but was he having traction problems or he just couldn't overcome the hp and torque disadvantage?

Is it pretty much a driver's race C5Z vs. stock E55 s/c?

 

Not sure because I have walked the C5 and my E55K is stock

 

Edited for you. I don't doubt you have, but looking at drag strip results around the country, it appears to be a driver's race.

At the other extreme, a new owner of a used C5Z raced me about 5 times one time. I beat him every time from every speed by 2-3 CLs. His shifting was THAT bad.

 

It's a lot harder to drive a Z06 properly than an automatic E55. "Drivers' race" +1

 

Before Carlsbad raceway closed I raced 3 different C5Z with a bone stock 04 E55. I was running 12.5's at 116. Beat every Vette that day. Unless they have intake, exhaust and drag radials not going to beat a Hammer.

 

If the DA would have allowed 116mph+ trap speeds from C5Zs that day, all 3 of those drivers sucked. I bet they were all hitting 2.0+ 60fts. Curious about their trap speeds though...

C5 Z06 Bone-Stock Times

1--11.783 @ 116.90--1.818--J-Rod---------'02
2--11.818 @ 117.26--1.783--Ranger--------'02 11/03 Slip
3--11.844 @ 117.91--1.761--Gary2004Z06--'04 12/07 Post 229, Slip
4--11.93x @ 119.xx--1.xxx --Esoteric-------'0x
5--11.97x @ 118.80--1.90x--GMHTP--------'04 03/04
6--11.99x @ 117.61--1.xxx --02Z06Racer---'02
7--12.048 @ 115.92--1.866--pwrshfd-------'02 12/03
8--12.08x @ 115.95--1.83x--Pray ----------'02 01/06 Slip
9--12.09x @ xxx.xx --1.79x--UVETTA -------'03
10-12.131 @ 120.65--1.970--zapp109-------'04 03/09 Slip, Post #384

12.205 @ 117.96--1.91x--Nat04Z06 -----'04
12.21x @ 112.xx--1.87x--Blue Angel----'02 07/04
12.227 @ 115.09--2.011--ZR WON -----'01 04/04 Post 6
12.22x @ xxx.xx --1.77x--holedgr-------'02
12.25x @ 117.xx--1.xxx --J Z06 --------'04 05/06
12.27x @ 115.16--1.957--SpeedFreak81-'03 07/07
12.2xx @ 1xx.xx --2.xxx --My1stZ ------'03

 

There was an apparently stock C6Z running low-mid 12's @ low 120's and got beaten by a stock SL65 at a local drag strip. I didn't get a chance to catch it because I came in later that night, but I did get to run the SL65...
First pass I missed 3rd and still won by pulling him top end. Second pass won by a bus+. My car had an intake which added maybe 15hp at most.

However when I first got my Z I would be trapping 114's and running embarrassing times like 13's and high 12's. A Z06 driver needs some time at the strip before he can develop a launch technique and learn to shift it properly.
An E55 could beat a C5Z no doubt, but if there was a situation where two are racing and both drivers are very experienced my money would go on the Z06.

 

I guessed they all sucked. But really posting the best C5Z times on preped tracks with drivers like Ranger overlooks the obvious that aint' the average Vett driver.

 

Also street vs track can be worlds apart. Often times when you run someone "stock" at the drag strip they are in race form with weight reduction, filters removed, race fuel, drag radials, 10-second burnouts, cooldown techniques, etc. This all gets taken away when you have impromptu races on the streets unless you're racing that rare hardcore racer who runs on drag radials and race fuel 24x7.

 

Point being it's fully a driver's race if not edge to the Z and 12.5 is sub-par.

Most of that goes away if from a roll and weight reduction and DRs is not stock. And these are bone stock times. Race fuel for a modern N/A car doesn't do any good unless tuned, drag radials are notated and don't do a whole lot for trap speeds.

Point being is best-to-best is how to compare two cars and if going from a roll, look at trap speeds.

 

The rule for getting on the bone stock list is that the car has to be in showroom form, no tires modifications and no weight reduction

 

Who flies out to every drag strip to verify each claim?

 

Good point: people do lie. A few years back we had a BMW troll here bragging about a "bone stock" E46 M3 that had run a 12.8 or somethng like that, and there was a video. But when you watched that video and freeze-framed it (or took freeze-frame snapshots as I did) you could see that the front seat had been removed, the rear wheels were non-stock, etc. etc...(I later nailed that same troll lying about the state of his *own* car; he was bragging about his own 1/4 mile time "stock", but lo and behold I found posts of his in another forum bragging about the drag radials he'd mounted up just days before the date on his time slip. ) So got a twofer there with two "bone stock" vehicles.

Not to say that everyone on this list is full of it as most of the traps aren't too far beyond the pale (although those 60' times are stellar for a 'vette w/that much power and that little weight), but for example a 3150 pound vette with a 175 pound driver trapping at 120.65 mph would be producing nearly 460 crank horsepower, which is nearly 60 over factory rated, and GM doesn't underrate their HP to this extent in my experience.

With 400 hp (or was it 405? I'll use that...) and 3150 pounds with a 175 pound driver, it should trap at 116 mph. Which would make it a pretty tight race against an E55 provided it had a very, very good driver who could time and execute his shifts with pert near perfect precision....of course, most drivers can't do that, which is why typically if you put an auto against a manual with relatively equal performance potential, the auto will usually come out on top, especially in standing start/low speed roll situation where any imperfections will be magnified.

 

Yes you are right.... our E55K is slow..... Corvette is lighter and faster and most of E55 drivers are not perfect.

 

Que? Are you responding to another post here? I ask this because your reply is basically implying that I wrote things that are 180 degrees out of phase with what I actually wrote.

 

True. Powershifting seems to pick up a few mph and of course negative DA "adding hp" for perhaps another 1-3mph depending. Nice thing about C&D is they don't powershift and adjust for zero DA so its a nice baseline.

 

A lot of those slips are signed by track officials stating that the car was inspected and appears stock (including tires). Ranger went to a track with a lot of corvetteforum.com members when he set his current stock C6Z06 record. They looked over his car and confirmed it was stock.

Of course on the internet and in real life things like ported TB/manifold or an ECU can go unnoticed. But if you want to get into BS 1/4 times then I would start with the guys who claim their stock 55k run 11's.

There are two versions of the C5Z06, one had 385bhp, and then I believe in 2003? they came out with a 405 one. Same LS6 just some different internals and those engines are known to be underrated

And speaking of weight, the 405HP Z06 (7.69 lbs per HP) over W211 E55's (8.75 lbs per HP). A significant power to weight advantage.

 

The '01 was rated at 385hp, '02-'04 was 405hp.

 

Not to cast any aspersions on him, but short of disassembling the engine and rearend, and examining the electronics, it's not possible to confirm it's stock. So it's always kind of a leap of faith on these things; people can, and do, lie. I've got a certain amount of benefit-of-the-doubt as far as ETs go, but if someone traps at 5 mph above average, my BS meter starts pegging pretty quick.

Hmmmm....
Looks pretty close to me. So if a C5 Z06 runs a half sec. or so faster than the mags got, it's not suspicious, while if an E55 beats C&D's time by 0.3 it is? Can't have it both ways....there is certainly potential for BS on both sides of the fence, which is why I always like to go back to more scientifically conducted tests, a'la the mags, as a good baseline comparison.

Only if you believe the factory rating of 469, which makes it hard to explain how it's trapping the same as the Z06 with (using your figures) a 14% power to weight disadvantage (or how the 1/4 times and traps in the E55 and E63 are basically identical, given that the E63 is rated w/36 more hp)...how can the E55 do that? How can it get to 150 mph in basically the same amount of time?

The obvious answer is that it can't trap the same with a 14% power to weight disadvantage, per Physics. The amount of power to accelerate a given mass to a given speed in a given amount of time scales up or down with mass, as acceleration = force/mass per Newton. So if the 'vette and E55 both hit 116 in the 1/4, then the power to weight (or weight to power, its reciprocal; 1/x = x) ratios need to be roughly the same (they needn't be identical, as driveline losses won't be identical, etc.)

So for the E55 to have 7.69, it needs to be close to 4087/7.69, or 531 crank. How does this work out if we use a horsepower calculator?

Well, the best hp calculator I've found is one I picked up in R&T. The formula correlates very well with rated hp in most cars, within 5% and normally much closer than that, and is: hp = weight*(trap/234)^3.

So for Z06 at 3150 pounds, 150 pound driver, trapping at 116 we have hp = 3300*(116/234)^3 = 402 hp. Rated = 405.

Not bad.

And for a C32 trapping at 106 at 3700 pounds w/driver, we have 3700*(106/234)^3 = 343. Rated = 349.

Not bad. It usually works out quite well, just remember to add the weight of the driver or it'll be off.

For the E55, it comes in at 4237*(116/234)^3 = 516 crank.

Which makes more sense than 469....and with dynos hitting 420-ish on these babies, it's kind of hard to swallow 469 crank either, which would require a mere 11% driveline loss; 420 at the wheels is 512 crank with an 18% driveline loss.

Anyway, there is plenty of data showing these two cars to be very close in performance, enough to where driver is probably going to determine the outcome in most cases.

 

Well the track was rented and the DA was somewhere in in the -1500 range

Actually it would have to beat that time by 0.6 not 0.3.

With a manual car it comes down to the driver factor much more than in an automatic, so the room for error/improvement is much higher.
How exactly do the magazines test the 1/4 times? Do they just do it once? If so I would say that if that driver raced that Z06 at a track on 10 different nights his time would definatly improve considerably... from personal experience I can't say the same for auto cars.

I am suspicious myself when it comes to any 1/4 times from any forum. I go to the track once a month and it is difficult to believe that someone can trap 1.5 miles faster and .6 seconds quicker than I can (plus I have slightly stickier tires than stock). But why say to yourself that it's impossible because a magazine's time was much slower? With perfect weather and track prep + a highly experienced driver like Ranger it could very well be true.

Even if it's not, it's a good motivator to learn to race better... for me atleast.

The SL55 a bit quicker than the W211 E55 anyway so I am sure that 1/4 figure would be another .7 or more to beat.

I think the consensus on MBWorld is that cars other than S, CL or SL55's with the 55k motor were underrated for marketing purposes. A guy buying an SL would not want an E class owner to have the same amount of power for a much lower price...
The LS6 is underrated as well, so I just figured to use the factory specs for simplicity.

Do you think the magazines could be a little biased sometimes? Maybe they got paid to run a covert advertising campaign by a car company? (Not questioning the SL55 review, just curious what you think, because sometimes I am little skeptical about how they do their reviews).

And have you ever tracked your CLS55?

 

Which would probably net him something like 0.2 and 0.2 mph, so it's mainly his mad launching skillz that are netting him those nutty low times (of course, if he's powershifting that could pick him up some time, and I assume he's also timing his shifts perfectly and executing them at lightning speed)..

I mixed my tests up. I was thinking of a 12.4 test, which it did run in R&T (12.4 @ 116.4); from this, 0.41 would put you in the 11's.

But from this one, 0.051 would get you an 11.99...still, that's am amazing pick up from the mags, but these things need to be launched at idle generally speaking; if the driver in question was on a sticky track with a great DA and managed to get a 60' 0.2-0.3 lower than the mags got, he'd have more than enough pickup to gain 0.5.

No, they do multiple runs in both directions to account for wind, etc. (something which isn't being done on these runs we're reading about, and a good tail wind will definitely help out), and at least one that I'm aware of, C&D, corrects to standard atmospheric conditions (sea level, 70 degrees as I recall, right around that at any rate)

Given that every 0.1 in 60' time results in 0.2 1/4 mile improvement, I'd say there's lots of room for improvement with something as tricky to launch as these. over 550 lb-ft on 265s (stock); hell, on my CLK55 with upgraded 265s on the rear, it was still very tricky to get really good launches, and the E55 has around 150% more torque!

Remember that at least one mag (Car & Driver) corrects for DA, so it's certainly possible to pick up a few mph and a few tenths with a DA from heaven and a fantastic launch.

Actually it's a bit slower; look at the test results above...it's around 400 pounds heavier, that hurts. They do have better launch/60' potential however as with the heavier weight (and more of it over the rears thanks to the roof mechanism) and fatter tires they should be able to pull a better hole shot, but past that the E55's weight advantage should win the day.

Well, I'm going by published traps of owners as well as the mags, along with scads of dyno runs, to make that estimate.

All humans are biased, but their numbers seem to be pretty good estimates of what a good driver can do, although this is clearly more true for some cars than for others. But with these two cars, I think the numbers they got are pretty reliable, and don't seem to indicate tweaked cars based upon what owners have gotten.

No, but I did duplicate the OP's results when I ran a C5 Z06 two times in a row several months back (and against the several C6s I've run--not Z06s there, standard model ), and this guy was pretty consistent so I assume he wasn't a novice, plue it sounded like he had at least an exhaust...but I do want to see how she'll do, and am planning on taking it to the strip when it opens up later this month, stay tuned.

 

Would need to compare 60fts to see the differences. 1.5mph is easily affected by DA and conditions. I've seen a C6 LS3 Hertz car (6-auto) trap about 112-113mph on a 98+ degree day. I was at 109mph. At 68 degrees would would be closer to 112 and 116mph and -1500 DA closer to 114 and 118mph.

Conclusions and ratings perhaps, but not test data.

-1500 DA vs. 0 DA would be about 1.5 mph, no?

The weight would affect the initial bite, but after that moment, the lighter weight plays into the advantage of the lighter car. Assuming everything else being equal. For instance, after say the initial 10ft, the lighter car is capable of of covering the remaining distance more quickly assuming there is no further loss of traction.

So the weight may help consistency, but there is a certain point when the lighter car should be able to cut a better 60ft. I would think this is the case with the stellar 60fts of the C5Zs on the list. Would you agree?