From the February 1997 issue of Car and Driver.
For 44 years now, Chevrolet has been mistakenly building the Corvette. This is absurd because any dictionary will tell you a corvette is not a car, but a small, lightly armed, fast warship. Well, last year, GM finally wised up and licensed the Corvette name to Malibu Boats. Located not in beautiful Malibu but in bucolic Merced in California’s central valley, the boatmaker has a three-year license to build the Corvette Limited Edition Ski Boat (Limited Edition Wet Vette was somehow not considered).
The Corvette is based on Malibu’s Echelon tournament ski boat, except that virtually everything but its hull shape was changed, including the fiberglass deck, the floor, the seating, the interior panels, the dashboard, and the instrument panel. With the approval of GM, the Torch Red boat was also given a C4-style rear-fascia treatment (using the taillight openings as bilge vents), instrument panel, glove box, and shifter and a dozen (count ’em) Corvette and Collector Edition emblems. Luxo touches include dash heater vents, a leather-covered tilting steering wheel, a 12-CD changer, a driver’s air lumbar adjuster, and—something the car needs badly—an in-dash ice chest. A tandem trailer, dressed up with Corvette wheels and P225/45ZR-17 tires, is also included. Callaway soups up a GM Vortec engine to give the boat Corvette-quality performance. In Old Lyme, Connecticut, the engine is stripped and reconfigured with a 3.75-inch stroker crank and a 0.030-inch overbore to bump displacement from 350 cubic inches to 383 cubic inches—the same as Callaway’s SuperNatural Corvette. The engine retains its roller cam followers but gets stiffer valve springs, forged rods, 10.5:1 pistons, four-bolt mains, and remapped ignition and electronic-fuel-injection programs. Callaway refers to the engine as the SuperNatural 383 Marine.
“We knew we wanted 400 pound-feet for acceleration and 400 horsepower for speed,” Malibu president Bob Alkema says. “We went to Callaway and said, ‘Four hundred and four hundred, please.'” What they got was exactly 400 horsepower at 5200 rpm and a stump-pulling 415 pound-feet of torque at 4200 revs.
We wondered where we could test the boat in Merced, which is farm country. As it turns out, Malibu knows a very rich man who built his own ski lake nearby. This seemed to have possibilities, not the least of which was that he might have a very rich and bored daughter with her own boat and motor.
The lake is nearly a half-mile long by 275 feet wide but just five feet deep, which means when a skier does a header after jumping the wake, his noggin strikes the bottom. Unless it strikes a catfish first. In which case you’ll be billed separately because they also raise catfish for sale here. “I smell a tax deduction,” I said to photographer Lorentzen as we drove from the airport.
“I smell a fish farm,” the photographer said as we turned into the driveway.
We already knew the boat wasn’t going to put any Corvette LT4 on the trailer in terms of top speed, but we weren’t so sure about acceleration. Stalking the boat with radar proved we were half-right. From 0 to 20 mph, the boat outgunned the car by a slim margin—about a 10th of a second—testimony to the boat engine’s low-end torque. From 20 to 40 mph, the car pulled even and then forged ahead by about a half-second. But above 40 mph, the LT4 was simply gone.
The crucible of street performance, 0-to-60-mph acceleration, was thus no contest. The LT4 romped to 60 mph in 5.1 seconds, whereas the Malibu Vette took 11.6 seconds to reach 57 mph, its top speed. The boat held this speed for the rest of the quarter-mile, which it covered in 18.5 seconds. This is unheard of in a production ski boat. Most ski boats won’t hit 50 mph. The LT4 dispatched the quarter-mile in 13.7 seconds at 104 mph.
As sobering as the drag-strip comparison turned out to be, the top-end difference was even greater. The Corvette LT4 convertible can storm to 160 mph—some 103 mph faster than the boat. But why? Das Boot weighs 960 pounds less than the car and has 70 more horsepower. For starters, ski boats have a one-speed transmission and a single-pitch prop that essentially serve as governors. Tournament ski boats also carry their engines amidships to generate minimal wake, but this creates copious hydrodynamic drag. In short, boats need to get up and out of the water to go fast, which also means they tend to handle spookily at speed. (This does not bode well for the weekend warrior tanked on margaritas.)
A much as the wet stuff holds the Malibu back at its top end, it doesn’t seem to contribute anything to stopping the craft. Whereas the LT4 can grind to a halt in 166 feet from 70 mph, the boat is relatively helpless at scrubbing off speed. Decelerating from 50 to 10 mph—the only meaningful range our Stalker radar gun could record—takes 231 feet.
There is another way. Turns out that if no tort attorneys are looking, a ski boat can be made to spin like an AMC Pacer on black ice. (We did not, repeat did not, learn about this from anyone at Malibu Boats.) First, apply throttle until the boat achieves a velocity that seems vaguely dangerous. Then crank in full left rudder, chop the throttle, and pop ‘er into neutral. The boat snaps left in a neat 180 (picture Roberto at Indy), leaving your spleen and any other unnecessary organs on the marine-grade carpeting. There is no purpose to this, except that it drives spousal units insane and makes them vow never to ride in a boat with you and your stupid friends again.
Indeed, cornering is the Malibu’s bailiwick. Running a 300-foot “skidpad” around buoys on nearby Yosemite Lake, the boat was limited by power rather than adhesion, unlike the LT4. The car averaged 0.87 g on the skidpad; the boat was just a click behind at 0.83 g—the equivalent of a Volvo 850R, which is not bad territory. And whereas the car has to be carefully balanced with the steering and throttle, the boat can be cornered at full throttle. The nose drops, the hull tilts inward, and the Malibu just sticks.
Following a skier’s slalom course is a good measure of overall handling. The official ski slalom uses an entry gate, six turn buoys, and an exit gate. In ski competitions, the boat drives straight through the middle of the 850-foot-long course while the skier zigs and zags left and right around the buoys. At Catfish Lake, the Malibu Vette followed the skier’s zigzag course in a best time of 19.5 seconds. The steering is massively heavy when you’ve fed in lock, but it’s feather light on-center. You’d be excused for complaining that this kind of feel belongs in a million-mile Checker, not a $45,000 boat. But that’s the nature of inboards: Prop thrust is forever trying to straighten the rudder.
We thought it would be interesting to run the car through an identical slalom marked by cones instead of buoys. It was. The car ran through the slalom at 21.69 seconds, or about 3 mph slower than the boat (albeit braking for the turns). This shows that in low-speed, tight maneuvers, at least, the car and the boat are close to equal.
With testing completed, there remained only one question anyone really cared about: Can you ski behind a car? It was Alkema who suggested that someone try. Shane Stillman, a Malibu product researcher and national-caliber skier, was perfectly willing to grab a ski and join the 50,000 catfish in 55-degree water the color of your Morgan’s engine oil after the head gasket blew.
Alkema drove down to the water’s edge and attached 75 feet of ski rope. He hit the throttle, and when the chocolate spray settled, water skier Stillman sat in six inches of water, sporting a bright, new gravel rash on his legs. The LT4 had yanked him ashore. No matter. With a bit of practice, Stillman got up and skied, only to reach the end of the frontage road before he dropped back into the soup. He did this over and over—mostly because the photographer begged him, but also because it was fun.
At least, he said it was.
Specifications
Specifications
1996 Chevrolet Corvette Collector Edition Convertible
Vehicle Type: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger convertible
PRICE
Base/As Tested: $46,671/$51,067
ENGINE
pushrod 16-valve V-8, iron block and aluminum heads, port fuel injection
Displacement: 350 in3, 5733 cm3
Power: 330 hp @ 5800 rpm
Torque: 340 lb-ft @ 4500 rpm
TRANSMISSION
6-speed manual
CHASSIS
Suspension, F/R: control arms/control arms
Brakes, F/R: vented disc/vented disc
Tires: Goodyear Eagle GS-C
F: 255/45ZR-17
R: 285/40ZR-17
DIMENSIONS
Length: 178.5 in
Width: 73.1 in
Height: 47.3 in
Curb Weight: 3460 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
30 mph: 2.1 sec
60 mph: 5.1 sec
1/4-Mile: 13.7 sec @ 104 mph
Top Speed: 160 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 166 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad: 0.87 g
850-ft Water-Ski Slalom Course: 26.7 mph
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Malibu Boats Corvette Limited Edition Ski Boat
Vehicle Type: mid-engine, 5-passenger boat
PRICE
Base/As Tested: $45,000/$45,000
ENGINE
pushrod 16-valve V-8, iron block and heads, port fuel injection
Displacement: 383 in3, 6276 cm3
Power: 400 hp @ 5200 rpm
Torque: 415 lb-ft @ 4200 rpm
TRANSMISSION
1-speed
CHASSIS
Brakes: reverse prop thrust; single anchor
Prop: 13-inch stainless steel
DIMENSIONS
Length: 240.0 in
Width: 90.0 in
Height: 36.0 in
Curb Weight: 2500 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
30 mph: 2.4 sec
57 mph: 11.6 sec
1/4-Mile: 18.5 sec @ 57 mph
Top Speed: 57 mph
Braking, 50–10 mph: 231 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad: 0.83 g
850-ft Water-Ski Slalom Course: 29.7 mph
C/D TESTING EXPLAINED