Outer Limits

In this latest installment of a never-ending LIMITS rivalry, the most powerful production versions of the Corvette and the 911 probe the boundaries of road-car capabilities.

- Eric Tingwall

RIVALRIES NEVER REST. A Bostonian’s contempt for New York doesn’t stop at baseball. Even when the Bears are garbage, the Packers don’t phone it in. The Wendy’s Twitter account won’t back down just because the McDonald’s social media team can’t field a comeback.

Corvette versus 911 is no different. This 53-year-old battle will never be over, and at the moment, the competition is as fierce as it’s ever been. With the near-simultaneous releases of the 755-hp Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 and the 700-hp Porsche 911 GT2 RS, we’re witnessing the ultimate showdown of the ultimate automotive adversaries. Here, these icons transcend their stations as sports cars to become legitimate supercars, each carrying a sticker price roughly three times that of the entry car on which it’s based.

With great power comes great irresponsibility. Both of these cars wrangle their starts-with-a-seven power outputs with carbon-ceramic brakes, Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires, and tall carbon-fiber wings to keep them planted. They perform at the contemporary limits of a street car’s capabilities. One will accelerate to 60 mph quicker than any other rear-wheel-drive car we’ve tested. The other brakes and corners on par with the stickiest street cars. You can understand how we were driven to do rash and impulsive things—such as stage a comparison test of two cars with sticker prices separated by $204,920.

Yes, we took some liberties with this one. If we had let the Car and Driver Indecision Vanquisher do its thing, the Chevy would have taken 20 points in the price category to the Porsche’s negative nine. That would have ended this face-off before it started. So we halved the price category to 10 points. The Corvette gets 10 points, the 911 gets one. You can direct your outrage toward your local congressperson.