As for my SEMA
"Wild One" Award, that has to be Team ETC's outrageous 'Vette-engined Saturn Sky they quite rightly call Super Sky.
This bunch of Canadian gearheads took GM's cute roadster, created a complete new carbon fiber coupe body, ditched the weenie 2-liter Ecotech motor and dropped a 1,000-horsepower, supercharged and nitrous-injected Corvette LT1 V8 in the back.
Looking like a scaled down Porsche Carrera GT, this tube-framed projectile actually has a bit of Porsche in it – it uses a Porsche transaxle to channel that massive power to the 22-inch rear rubber.
But don't count on sharing the experience of taming 1,000 horsepower with your buddies – the Super Sky has only one seat, which is in the middle, McLaren F1-style.
GM's sister car to the Saturn Sky, the Pontiac Solstice, got an absolutely stunning makeover for SEMA by GM's own design team. The
Solstice SD-290 concept shows how the car might look as a cool track racer. And "cool" is the only way to describe it.
Its smooth, lightweight, wind-cheating body features a passenger cockpit tonneau cover, a new hood with heat-extracting vents, forged 19-inch thin-spoke alloys shod with Hoosier rubber, and shimmery metallic red paint.
Up front, the little Pontiac's 2.0-liter Ecotec turbo motor is bumped up to 290 horsepower and comes with a big-bore exhaust with center-mounted pipe. Stick a set
of vinyl numbers to the doors and couldn't you just picture yourself on the starting grid at Laguna Seca?
Parked close by the racing Solstice on the GM stand was the winner of my
"Lean, Mean, Green Machine Award" – Jay Leno's awesome Corvette C6RS, created by Pratt & Miller Engineering.
The beauty of this 8.2-liter, 600-horsepower road-burner is that is can run on mushed sweetcorn, better known as E85 ethanol. "I love the idea of having 600 horsepower at my disposal, but using a home-grown alternative to gasoline," Leno told show-goers.
The C6RS features a stunning carbon fiber body pretty much identical to Pratt & Miller's five-time Le Mans-winning Corvette Racing C6.R GT machines. As for wheels – a vital ingredient for any car being shown at SEMA – it rolls on center-locking black chrome forged alloy BBS rims covering massive, pizza-sized Brembo rotors. The black paintwork on the show car was so deep and rich it could double as a shaving mirror.
And the good news that this isn't some one-off created for the car-crazy Leno. Pratt & Miller plans a limited run of around 25 of these super-Vettes. When they start building them next April, they'll probably cost around $225,000, including the price of a Z06 donor. But for those who can't wait for Chevy's long-awaited Blue Devil/Corvette SS/Stingray/Z07 650hp-plus super Corvette they're still thinking-up the name – this might fill the gap.
