All the details you don't know about Holden's Corvette C8

Okay, our main cover line this month may be just fudging a tiny bit. The all-new C8 Corvette won’t wear a Holden badge, but it will be sold in selected Holden dealerships, so that effectively makes it a Holden supercar, doesn’t it?

Anyway, enough semantics; the big news is that the mid-engined two-seater is destined for our shores in factory-built right-hand-drive specification, and this month’s Wheels has all the crucial info you need about the car’s mechanical package, its performance, the engineering behind it, and what Aussie customers will pay when it arrives later next year.

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Our sources suggest it will go head-to-head, in price terms, against the likes of Mercedes-AMG C63 Coupe, but will have a dynamic advantage to show that car a very clean pair of tailpipes. Excited? Are we what. We’ve got Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA playing on repeat, and we don’t intend to take it off until the ’Vette gets here.

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Anyway, if you love performance cars, our Atmo Heroes feature will have you frothing. We figured, in an increasingly turbo-charged world, it was time to celebrate the best free-breathers in the business. We pull together six of the finest, including the utterly feral Porsche 911 GT RS, and cut loose on the Haunted Hills circuit and the roads in the surrounding Gippsland region. Good times and 9000rpm redlines follow.

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But none of this is to suggest we’re out of love with the good old turbocharger. The folks at Mercedes-AMG are also clearly very partial to the mechanical snail, and use one to excellent effect to extract a production-record 310kW from the 2.0-litre turbo four fitted to the AMG A45, creating a new benchmark in the hyper-hatch category. We were delighted to accept an invitation to sample their new creation on both road and track in Spain, and we were suitably moved, both physically and emotionally, by its quite unhinged level of performance. And did we mention Drift Mode? Yep, it’s got one of those, so if you dig getting two turnin’ and two burnin’, you’ll want to read all about it.

“That sounds brilliant, Ash,” I hear you saying, “but what about a profile feature on someone really interesting I need to know about?”

So glad you asked. Editor Inwood sits down with Porsche heavy-hitter Frank-Steffen Walliser, the man who shall be known from this moment forward as Mr 911. Frank has recently taken over the reins for the most important car in Porsche’s line-up, and arguably the most iconic sports car the world has ever known. So yeah, a bit of pressure, but Frank assures us he’s go the whole “don’t mess with an icon” thing under control, and lets slip on a some tasty details about what we can expect as the current 992 generation evolves… and beyond.

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Speaking of icons, Audi has one in the upstairs cupboard called Ur Quattro, and there’s a fascinating backstory attached to the birth of the modern all-wheel-drive performance car. Who better to tell it, then, than a bloke who’s a bit of an icon himself, the only slightly retired Peter Robinson. Robbo jetted over to Germany to talk to some of the men pivotal in the creation of this road and rally legend, and the real story of how it all came to fruition will surprise and thrill.

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But there’s a stack more great reading in September’s Wheels magazine, including our visit to Mercedes’ secret bunker housing all its most historically significant cars, a flat-chat thrash of Porsche’s sublime Cayman GT4, a comparo of premium SUVs, and a peek at the mutant mid-engined Commodore ute that helped spawn the new C8 Corvette. I could go on. But you get the point. So get the magazine. It’s in all good places where magazines are sold - and some pretty average ones, too, but that’s not our fault. Actually, you could avoid them altogether by subscribing, and have Wheels delivered to your door at a discount. Now there’s a top idea.

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