Corvette Concedes The Nürburgring To Ford, Has A Different Mountain To Climb
Tony Roma isn’t interested in a lap-time rematch. The GM Executive Chief Engineer for Corvette and Performance Cars told The Drive flatly that Chevy has no plans to send the Corvette back to the Nürburgring after Ford’s Mustang GTD Competition beat the Corvette’s sub-seven-minute lap. “I’m not planning on running back and tit-for-tat ‘look at what we can do’ to answer what they did,” Roma said on The Drivecast.
That’s about as direct as it gets from the man running Corvette’s performance program, and it lands differently than the usual corporate non-answer. Roma isn’t dodging the question or hiding behind a future-plans disclaimer. He’s saying Chevy already had somewhere else to be this year, and that somewhere was Pikes Peak.
Roma Knows This Stings, And He’s Fine With It
Roma didn’t pretend the decision would land well with the fan base. “I know that disappoints a lot of people, I hear about that at corrals and public events,” he said. That’s a specific admission, corrals being the meet-and-greet events where Corvette owners line up their cars and talk shop with GM engineers, and it tells you this isn’t a hypothetical concern. People have been asking him about it directly.
His answer isn’t that Chevy can’t beat Ford’s time. It’s that he doesn’t think it should have to try just because Ford moved first. “When we have something that’s worthy and a story that’s worth telling, we’ll do something, but I’m not planning on running back and tit-for-tat,” he said. “We’re going to do something that makes sense for us.”
Why Chevy Already Had A Different Mountain In Mind
The timing matters here. Roma says the Pikes Peak plan was locked in before Ford’s latest Nürburgring run happened, not drawn up as a face-saving pivot afterward. “By the time they went back there this year, we had already planned on going to Pikes Peak,” he said, calling the Colorado hill climb “a truly American, iconic motorsports event that goes back almost a hundred years.”
The Corvette connection to Pikes Peak runs deeper than a marketing angle. Roma’s team dug up photos of Zora Duntov racing a prototype Corvette up the mountain in the 1950s, and Duntov actually set the Pikes Peak hillclimb record in a prototype ’56 Chevy before going on to set a flying-mile record at Daytona that same year. For a program built on Duntov’s legacy, that’s not a borrowed story, it’s the original one.
A Homegrown Record Chevy Still Won’t Stop Bragging About
Roma made clear the Nürburgring effort that produced Corvette’s sub-seven-minute lap, the fastest an American car had run at the time, wasn’t a throwaway accomplishment. He emphasized that Chevy used its own development drivers rather than hiring Nürburgring ringers, which is standard practice for most manufacturers chasing a record lap. “It was intended to be more than just ‘look at how fast our cars are,’ it’s ‘look at how capable our whole team is,” he said, pointing to in-house Michelin tire engineers and battery-analysis work as part of that effort. “I mean, just drop the mic, it is an accomplishment to be under seven minutes with our own development drivers.”
He also gave Ford its due. “Ford’s response was also, as a car fan, kind of epic,” Roma said. “Like, ‘Hey yeah, we’ve got this crosstown rivalry thing going on.” That’s not the language of a team conceding defeat. It’s a competitor picking a different fight on purpose, and saying so out loud.
Roma hasn’t closed the door on another Nürburgring run outright, he just won’t do it on Ford’s schedule. For a rivalry that’s thrived on tit-for-tat numbers, that’s a notable shift, and it puts the pressure back on Chevy to make Pikes Peak mean something the way the ‘Ring record once did.
Sources: The Drivecast
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