Video: Jessi Lang Attempts to Tame The Mighty ZR1 at Bondurant

Is it really possible to tame the most powerful production Corvette of all time? Perhaps tame is even the wrong word to use; maybe “harness” would be a better choice. In this episode of The J-Turn, host Jessi Lang attempts to answer this very question at the Bondurant School of High Performance Driving with the Corvette ZR1.

Grand Am driver Daren Law serves as Lang's instructor as she learns how to harness the ZR1's incredible power.

Her guide on this undertaking is Bondurant instructor and Grand Am driver, Daren Law. The biggest value of this video is hearing Law’s professional explanations of how to heel-toe downshift, as well as his descriptions of understeer and oversteer while he and Lang are working in Bondurant’s G8 Skid Car. Of course, there’s definitely some entertainment value in watching as “The Man” himself, 80-year old Bob Bondurant takes Lang for a few hot laps and shows how to really get the most out of the ZR1.

Every student driver at Bondurant is given a grade at the end of the course, a rating from one to five, with five being a perfect score. You’ll have to watch to see what grade Lang received, but we will share what Lang has to say about the true nature of the ZR1: “My whole objective here was to ‘tame the ZR1’ and what I came away from this knowing is that the ZR1 is not meant to be tamed. It should be wild, free, and unbroken. You just need to respect it.”