Father Wows Son with C6 Z06’s Carbon Ceramic Stopping Power
Perfect 2012 C6 Centennial Edition Z06 hits a home run for its owner, despite a few hiccups along the way.
Buying the right C6-era Corvette for some is simple as heading over to the used lot of one’s nearest dealer. For others, it means looking everywhere around the country for the specific pieces desired.
Such was the case for Eric McClellan, who sat down with VINwiki to tell the story of his search for a C6 with carbon ceramic brakes.
“I knew I wanted something American, something at least a V8 — I didn’t want a Viper because I already had one of those,” McClellan said. “Something super-lightweight, and something I was familiar with. So, that turned out to be, of course, lo and behold, the Corvette.”
With advice from his friend Jeff Schwartz, McClellan began looking for a C6 with carbon ceramic brakes, as he didn’t want to worry about overheating issues like that experienced by some C7s. The only options he knew of then were the Carbon Edition or the ZR1, plus the Z07 package. But then, he found another way to his dream.
“Doing my favorite trick of going through Craigslist and seeing poorly advertised cars, [I] found one in Arkansas,” said McClellan. “And this was a C6 2012 Centennial, which is a special package edition, with the Z07 package with carbon ceramic brakes. And that’s what I wanted. That was the big thing.”
After some wheeling and dealing with the then-owner, plus a two-month wait until he had time to head down, McClellan and his wife flew to Arkansas to find a few quirks with the purchase, beginning with the replacement of the front Michelin Sport Cup 2 tires with all-season units. Additionally, the seller was severely underwater with the loan on the Z06, and the car had a built-in radar detector, which worked as well as it could on the road trip back. But there was one feature which befuddled McClellan more than any other.
“The weird thing about the car, though, was it had this weird thing on the windshield that you couldn’t see through,” said McClellen. “It looked like somebody had waxed it. You couldn’t see through it, and it was really dangerous at night.”
No matter what the McClellens did, though, the issue remained until sometime after coming home, when McClellen took it to a friend’s body shop. Turns out the owner had attempted to factory clear-coat the windshield. Not only was the windshield affected, but every window had the clear coat. Before his friend replaced the windshield, McClellen took a key to the clear-coated unit to scrap it off, all to no avail.
“My son, who is kind of the one who gives the ‘thumbs-up, thumbs-down’ on all my cars… I said, ‘Alright, buddy, check this out,'” said McClellan. “[I] get to a nice, straight stretch of land, nobody for miles — I’m not gonna hurt anybody — and I just lay into it.”
The verdict? His son wasn’t impressed with the power of the LS7. However, McClellen pulled out all the stops, literally, putting the carbon-ceramic brakes at a T-intersection with farmland on the other side of the road in front of them. To say his son was floored by the stopping power of the Z06 would be an understatement. And yet, McClellen had one more trick planned, one for his local autocross event.
“I had been trying to win this one race for a very long time called the Street Machine Nationals,” said McClellan. “I had gotten second and fourth before, and this time, I got second — I lost by a technicality — and it really irritated me.”
Declaring this time would be his year to take the top spot, he and his Z06 annihilated the competition to the point where the organizers just asked McClellan to come get his trophy, while telling the audience that “you don’t need to bring an AR-15 to a knife fight.” Just another day in carbon ceramic paradise.
