Many of you probably heard about Mark's adventures this fall. We have a brief video to show you before we get our discussion underway. So if the folks can run that video, I'd call your attention to the screen.
Holy crap, that's fast! Here at Papenburg in Germany at the test facility, we brought the new Corvette ZR1 and we were here to test the top speed of the car. So we really wanted to get a real understanding of what the top speed is. This is a great place to do it; it's designed to do things like this. So the LT7 basically is unhinged. It delivers this power in an obscene way, and how well it puts the speed down and how comfortable the car is to drive. I've never obviously gone that fast. You can't do it without confidence, and the confidence comes from all the people that are here that prepare the car, but also the engineers that engineer it. 233 flat on the first run, and then 233.5. Wow. We had a pretty good idea what the number was going to be, and so today we proved that it's a testament to just how strong the engineering teams are, the analysis teams, and the development engineers that can deliver on what we thought was going to be.
So Mark, 233 plus miles per hour in a ZR1 Corvette. Tell us what that was like.
No, it was fantastic. You know, the car, we've been architecting the car for a while. First of all, I was honored that these engineers, they're kind of like my kids. There are some young people there that are really special that we've mentored up through that whole process on C8, and I saw quite a few of them there. That was very special. They said, 'We really want your name on the record,' and I said, 'Wow, okay.' So we flew in the night before, right. And Jeff Gordon had never been to the Nürburgring, so we were going to go to the Nürburgring after we did Papenburg, so that's why he's in it. He's just there, right? So that was pretty cool. We flew in and did a practice run the night before when we landed in Papenburg, and I did like 230, which is what the simulation said we were going to do, pretty close to that. But the next morning at 6:00 a.m., we had the track for another hour as the sun rose on it, which was pretty awesome. The temperatures, there was very little wind. Setting that record, you have to go north on it and then you have to go south on it; it's the average of those two. And there's a 50-degree banking you could see it there that you hit, but you got to hit that to get the speed. We did. You had to get 222 into the banking on the 50-degree, and then to exit and hit the straight wide open, because you basically run out of track and you run out of car, the aero, and everything flat out. But overnight, which is really cool, we found another two and a half miles per hour. We sent the data back from the night before to Pontiac, and our engineers worked all night to get a new calibration into the car at 6:00 a.m., and that's when we got 233 and a half. So it was a great story of teamwork. But the speed itself, it's a little... everything happens really fast, let me just tell you that. Really fast. Every small input and every part of that sensory experience of what it feels like when things go by you in a car is unnatural. So I'll leave it at that. It was pretty cool. It's obviously not something we should try at home or on the Lodge Freeway.
No, no, no. Doing that on the Lodge. Do you have a racing certification?
I do. I have a couple of them. I have an FIA license, which is really cool, and then SECA, and then the Nürburgring, what's called an industry pool license, which you have to be certified to run that track, which is 12.9 miles, 154 turns, and 12.9 miles, and that's one lap. So that's a very, very challenging track. So we run that a few times a year with the cars we develop. We do all of our development work on Blackwings and Corvettes and anything else that's high-powered over there.
So you got the proving grounds and Spring Mountain. How much track time do you normally get in a month or a year?
It's hard because I'm here in the winter obviously, and we're going to go to Spring Mountain next week, so we get a little time there. But unless we go somewhere more exotic, which we don't do too much anymore, it's at least twice a year in Germany at the Ring. And then every Friday we spend about four or five hours at the proving grounds, and we drive every car we develop against the competition at every stage of development, from conception. So we do that every Friday. If it's a high-performance car, we'll do it on our Milford Road Course, but most cars we take them off property and we drive them like customers would, whether it's on the freeway with Super Cruise or in a city. We do all of that in four or five hours every week on Friday. So I don't know if you call it track time, but that's what I really love. I love the engineering part. I'm an engineer, so going out and racing cars, number one, I don't have time for that anymore, and number two, the value that I bring to the company, I believe, is not that. The value I can bring to the company is mentoring people that you saw there and developing our cars. So that's very important to me.
Since you did the 233, I think GM sales went up about 21% last quarter.
Yeah, last quarter. Thank you. It's great what GM does with Spring Mountain. For those who don't know, if you buy a Corvette, they subsidize a trip out to Spring Mountain to really try these cars out on the track, see what they can really do, learn what the car can do.
Great. So how important is the Corvette and the IMSA racing program to the overall innovation at General Motors?
It's very important. If you go back in our history, there was a time when racing was banned, which is when the Grand Sports came about and were given to privateers like Roger Penske and those folks to run in the Nassau racing IMSA series against the Cobra. They were built to beat the Cobras. So racing was banned, but then we opened up racing and really went hard at it. But then there was a period of time when I joined the company when racing was run through sales and marketing, which wasn't great from a technical transfer, and we weren't very competitive in some ways. So we really changed that model post-bankruptcy to an engineering model. We have developed technical centers in Charlotte, for instance, where we have all of our driving simulations and all of our aero work, and now our Formula 1 dynamometer will be the only one of these in America to develop Formula 1 chassis and powertrains together in Charlotte. And then we have our center here in Detroit that does a lot of work on combustion and all of that. So those data transfers, you know, on the Cadillac engine that runs in IMSA, for instance, on the LMDh, that's an engine that we designed, engineered, and build. And the Corvette is the same way. The Corvette 5.5-liter flat-plane crank, we make those race engines. So very different than some of our competitors that may farm it out to another company or another country and then bring it back and race it. We don't do that. So it's very important that we have that technical transfer. A lot of our direct injection on our internal combustion engines comes from innovations we have in IndyCar, for instance, where we put plugs and where we inject and the efficiency of that. So it's extremely important. People-wise, we just rotated out two of the program managers, engineers off of IMSA and Corvette, two women that are now back into our mainline engineering and release programs. So she brings urgency. Every week you have to perform, you have to race, you have to win or lose on the track. We bring that mentality back into our product development cycle.
Awesome. So on a personal note, what was your first car? And add to that, what's your favorite car?
My first car was a 1967 Camaro that me and my dad found. He's from Southern Illinois, and his brother found it down there. It was $1,300 of my lawn mowing money that we went down and brought back. It was a 327, 250 horsepower, not a fancy car. My dad, I was 15 or 16, so my dad was like, 'I'm not putting that in your hands yet.' But it was a red car with a white bumblebee stripe, and it had a custom interior. If you remember the custom interiors on the first Camaros, they're black with a white stripe on the inlay of the seats. It was a Powerglide car, power steering, power glide, air conditioning. It was not fast, but it was awfully fun.
Is that your favorite car as well?
No, it's not my favorite car. No, it's not. My favorite car is yet to be produced. I don't have a favorite car. I love all the cars we make, and I love the tracks. At $28,000, I take a lot of pride in being able to deliver that kind of car to someone who's really young in their first car, and maybe their parents bought it, maybe they did it themselves, but it's freedom. Entry car into freedom is just as important to us as ZR1s and all that stuff. I love that stuff, but to put someone in a Chevrolet and provide that freedom is a big deal for me.
We got a lot of C8 owners out here, but they're all asking me, thank you by the way. Are we going to see a manual transmission on a GM sports car in the future?
