It’ll stay alive until I run out of steam. Anyway, review time.
American Eagle Automotive brings us, the Corzippa GT.
A snippet from the European automotive magazine Driving Gloves, August 1982.
Last week we got a Corzippa GT in for review and boy did me and Jim enjoy our time with it!
Are you by chance looking for a zippy, solid sports car? Well, you might just be in luck this year. The GT, with its 2.6 liter naturally aspirated V6, does 0-100 in a mere 7 seconds. Not bad for 140 horsepower. This being something of a premium coupe coming in at just under 990 kilograms, we were quite surprised. In more ways than one. Oh, and did we mention that the engine’s rear-mounted? You might not think it just from seeing the front of the car.
Let’s get into it. Literally.
Jim, properly seated in the somewhat cramped driver seat, set out to find some issue with the interior. (I’m pretty sure he just likes knobs and buttons.) He didn’t find anything. Imagine that! We were both expecting to stumble into at least one cut corner but nope. You get what you see and it all works. AEA had boldly stated that this car would be going head to head with the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro. Perhaps even blow them out of the water. Sitting in the GT, well, you can kinda see it. Kinda. It’s a cramped car. There’s no denying it. With someone in the passenger seat you feel even more confined. Sardine syndrome. Oh well. Screw the Mustang and Camaro! It’s a fast car, so who cares!
Smooth gearbox. Smooth acceleration. Smooth car! The one performance complaint we could come up with is the lackluster top speed. This ride, costing you about $4300, won’t quite get you up to 200km/h. We couldn’t do it at least, and that was on a test track! So, acceleration over top speed. Power does drop off somewhat at the higher RPMs (redline at 6200) so you might be struggling after reaching about 140km/h. Not that you’d want to try that.
At high speed this thing suddenly becomes very clumsy. Go straight. That’s all you can hope to do. The steering gets floaty and extremely unresponsive after reaching 150km/h. Kinda like driving a fish. This, coupled with some feeble, lackluster solid disc brakes (HERE’S the cut corner we were looking for), might give you something of a shock. Were you driving a responsive sports car a few seconds ago? Well not anymore! Buckle up. Or don’t go that fast. That’s the best advice we can give you.
On a more positive note, we’ve been testing the GT all weekend on a full tank of gas (regular, mind you) and it’s still going! This is one lean engine, folks. Power and economy? Almost seems too good to be true.
And so, our final verdict.
Should you get it? - Sure! If you don’t plan on having a family anytime soon.
Is it worth it? - Man, a sports car this speedy and you can fill it up on regular gas? Worth it.
