Not long after I made the blanket statement that all vintage muscle cars are indistinguishable from one another because they all have bias ply tyres, no ABS, leaf springs, open diffs, powerful NA V8s, gearing that only pulls for a quarter mile, and heavy bodies, Vic pulls this thing out his behind and forces us all get intimately acquainted with the steaming extract.
Okay, fine, it's still got a big, powerful V8 up front. Powered by a 6.2L V8, Chris Holstrom Concept's take on a fourth generation Chevrolet Nova uses many modern mechanicals underneath its totally nondescript, period correct body. So thick is the sheep's clothing on this "1967" Nova in fact, that the only hints that this has a nuclear powered wolf underneath are the 4 wheel ventilated disc brakes peeking through modern Forgeline RB3C wheels, wearing impossibly low profile Continental ContiSportContact 5P tyres, with a width of 275mm up front and 305 in the rear, and a modern number plate if your base Nova is registered recently before being driven into CHC's shop in Puyallup Washington. Apparently there's also a small, hand–made cowl vent and air dam below the bumper that could tip off onlookers, but even after spending the week with the car, I still see nothing that really sticks out. It's that incognito.
Powered by a LS9 engine that usually propels a sleek C6 Corvette ZR1 however, any pretence that this is a modestly quick grandpa's car that might have existed in anyone's mind will be eviscerated quicker than the fuel in its tank the moment the engine is started. "But why would I want to spend 300 grand on a brick with a ZR1 engine if I can just buy a ZR1 at a third of the cost?", I hear you echo my past self. How about the fact that the LS9 in the Nova has been mutated to produce another 94HP? No? The fact that it has a five speed manual? A locking diff? Or the fact that this package weighs just 1,366kg (3,011lbs), a whole 142 kilos (311lbs) lighter than said C6 ZR1?
(Golly I sure hope this thing has ABS...)
Okay, so it's super impressive on paper. That much should be a given for a car that has won a GT Award at SEMA, right? But how is it to drive?
That's me in the RX-7, narrowly avoiding getting speared in my rear by a Nova doing 165km/h... in reverse... airbourne.
It's TERRI–FLIPPING–FYING to drive. As if you needed to ask!
(I'm sorry, I usually don't highlight people wiping out, but this is just way too damn funny to me! No hard feelings?)
Modern mechanicals this car may boast, but a racing car this thing is by far not. The suspension is set up way too soft for the power it has and the mass that it doesn't—racing drivers become part time astronomers with how much the nose of this thing lifts on power during corner exits, causing orbital amounts of understeer which, now that I think about it, might be a deliberate design choice so that you might actually see the wall you hit instead of the anal alternative. As a result of the soft suspension, the car sorely lacks the precision one would depend their life on in a car with a better power–to–mass ratio than a Veyron. It will squirm, it will flex, it will protest, and it won't at all hesitate to snap and spit you off the track if you think you've any bargaining power in a relationship that involves your partner having 732HP (546kW). It's a car in which I don't much endeavour to use every millimetre of the road and nail every apex, because I'm more than happy enough to simply make it through a corner alive.
While the CHC Nova shares the same engine as a C6 Corvette, its aerodynamic properties are more akin to a block of C4—never before in my four years of playing this game have I ever caught air at the back straight of Maggiore GP, but lo and behold, that's exactly what happened at a GT3–esque 255km/h (158mph) on said back straight.
All these atrocities is even before this car reaches its peak power output at 6,500rpm. Redlining at 7k, you'll need to wring this Corvette engine as though a Wankel to get the most of it, but the thing is, this engine propels the car so quickly, and the car has so little finesse in comparison that you'll never really have 732HP most of the time, let alone be able to use it. The engine is so peaky it almost feels like a turbocharged unit with how severe a spike in power this thing gets near redline. That's right; all the horrors I described above? Those are all before we even get to the meat skewer of its powerband. It feels fine with however much it produces in the mid–range, and like any good muscle car, it's receptive to being lugged in a lower gear despite its power and torque curves suggesting otherwise. Trust me, it's enough. In fact, many a times I've to make very short lived upshifts when approaching a corner, and I often over rev the engine because the last 500 or so rpm goes by so disproportionately quickly.
To be entirely fair, once if you get over the shock and horror of the power that dominates the experience of driving a CHC Nova, the car itself doesn't handle too horrifically. Yes, the suspension is soft, but that also means that kerbs are a total non issue for the car. The car itself is also surprisingly balanced! I'd really love to know the exact mass distribution of the car, because it feels to me something like a FC RX-7–esque 54/46 F/R, which would be quite the feat considering it's got a 6,162cc engine up front that requires custom headers just to fit under the anvil bonnet. It stops superbly well for a road car with zero aerodynamic devices on it—far better than many of the modern super and hypercars that pack comparable power to it, even with their heavy active aero crap. The fact that this car is one of the very select few to be equipped with non Sports Hard tyres by default from Brand Central—Sport Medium tyres in this case—probably has a lot to do with that stopping performance. It's not a car that's unreasonable or unpredictable—you "just" need to get used to having 732HP and the resultant speeds, learn to brake early, and be gentler on the gas pedal than you would a newborn kitten on corner exits. And uh... watch the body roll. And the power understeer. And the power oversteer. And the torque spike. And the aerodynamic lift at high speeds. Hey, I never said it was easy! I'm just saying it could be worse! Way worse!
So what have we learnt so far? That the CHC Nova is expensive, powerful, difficult to drive, and terrifying. Are there any alternatives to it that can give similar performance though, and preferably at a cheaper (laundromat) cost? Well, as Baron has proven on race day, the Mustang Mach Forty is just as fast, if not more so, than the CHC Nova even when kneecapped to the Nova's original power and mass as per our lobby's regulations, while costing the exact same 300,000 Credits. Not sure how much I want to deal with a rear mid engine layout though, if the Nova is already so bloody terrifying at these power levels. Despite having less power and more mass on paper, the 2018 Camaro ZL1 1LE is much better set up for track use, and will happily hang with its resurrected ancestor with a transplanted heart while costing less than a third its asking price. If you can wring any enjoyment from driving that soulless lump of marketing metal, or if you can actually get a read on the damn thing, the Taycan will utterly destroy the Nova, saving you 70 grand in the process in exchange for proving to the world beyond any doubt that you're more a benevolent, unfeeling machine whose sole reason for existence is to destroy other racers than an actual human being capable of emotions.
But all that is completely irrelevant, isn't it? A person shopping for something as niche and focused as a CHC Nova will know exactly what they're looking for, where to find it, the price they'll have to pay for it, both financial and practical, and won't settle for anything else—because in spite of having modern mechanicals, the CHC Nova is, in my culturally ignorant opinion, the purest muscle car one can buy (sort of...) in the 21st century.
Sure, Chevy, Dodge, and Ford still make muscle cars, and I thoroughly enjoy the Camaro ZL1 1LE and Charger Hellcat that are both in this game. But they don't... have that raw, bleeding edge to it. They feel compromised from having to adhere to modern day safety and emissions regulations, customer demands, and so on. Maybe this is just the opinion of someone who was never a fan of muscle cars and doesn't know a whole lot about them as a result, but to me, what makes the persona of a muscle car is obviously its straight line speed, but also how everything else has to utterly, shamelessly, proudly, unabashedly SUCK. Cornering, safety, fuel economy, build quality, comfort. I feel like that shameless sucking is part of the charm of a muscle car. It speaks a lot of the person who would knowingly own such a thing, about their priorities, their sense of security, their inner child, and their ability to be responsible enough to restrain themselves when driving the sort of deathtrap on public roads and still be alive to this day. Modern muscle cars just don't have that cool, shameless aura of, "Yeah, I know this this and this about my car is awful, what of it? It's cool, I like it, and that's all that matters" that seemingly makes the driver larger than life.
The problem is that modern cars simply cannot suck nowadays. Everything has to be accountable, responsible, sensible, and perhaps most importantly I suspect, legally unassailable. Don't get me wrong—that's wonderful for us consumers, but I feel that it does hinder the character of some cars, such as Lamborghinis for example, and muscle cars. If a muscle car handles well, has a nice interior, and salvageable fuel economy, then it's just a sports or GT car with a high drag body, isn't it? I've even said before in my 2016 Camaro SS review that "I can very easily see (it) being the FD RX-7 or 993 911 for somebody else who grew up in a different time or place". I meant it as high praise, but I'm not entirely sure if it's a good thing.
The CHC Nova on the other hand, is like a fusion of eras that permeates beyond its retro body; it drives like a vintage muscle car in spite of its modern equipment. It has sloppy, lopsided handling that no person in a suit and tie would greenlight in a big company. It would still sooner deactivate your heart than any of its cylinders, and it will properly horrify anyone who drives it. What those modern mechanicals do is, instead of taking away the horrors of driving a muscle car, they instead take away any excuse a driver might have for a sloppy display at a track. It invalidates the excuse of, "it's not me, it's the car". And what that results in is, quite frankly, a glimpse into an alternate reality we never had. A reality where cars can have and embrace faults and character. A muscle car that can be a muscle car thorough and through in 2021. A car that can scare its drivers and intimidate onlookers. It is a car that can only be driven someone who thinks that they know what they're doing, and may God bless them like He did America if they think they do. Me personally, I wouldn't go anywhere near striking radius of that thing, which, given the speeds it's capable of, I'd say... maybe 500 miles? THAT, to me, is a muscle car.
The CHC Nova feels very personal. Intimate, even. If I have to provide an analogy, the ZL1 and Hellcat is like reading the biography of someone, and the CHC Nova feels like reading that person's diary—one is a product, and the other is a passion. A product can be good or bad. People can enjoy it or dislike it. But it needs to justify itself to others in order to continue its existence. A diary on the other hand, is entirely independent of the needs or enjoyment of others, because it's a personal thing with unmasked feelings and unique perspectives, whose worth stems from being different from others, and therefore deserves to exist by definition. There is no benchmark, no measure for how good or bad a diary entry is, and any such judgment therefore becomes completely subjective, if not irrelevant. I may not like the person, but every time I've managed to read the thoughts that someone else has penned down, I've enjoyed the experience and gained new perspectives, making me more empathetic a person. It's why documentaries and autobiographies of murderers and other such criminals exist, isn't it? The contents may be raw, it may be rough, it may even be repulsive, but there is a lot to be said about the purity and honesty in a diary that money cannot buy, and there often is a priceless sweetness buried in the ugly emotions. The 300,000 Credit CHC Nova then, feels almost like a diary or a love letter with a price tag slapped onto it. It has that nonchalant, self–assured charisma to it that makes a muscle car a muscle car, that modern muscle cars have lost a little bit of. I hugely respect CHC for putting this out there to the world, and I'm very glad I got to experience it even if only through a digital divide. Because gosh knows I'll never have the balls to in real life.
I mean, hell, even writing these long, unprofessional, somewhat personal reviews to a small audience is pretty much at the limit of what I dare do.
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