We’re only 15 minutes into our drive through the winding backroads of Monterey in the all-new Corvette when my stomach starts doing somersaults.

I’m not car sick. I don’t get car sick. Never have. But despite a decade of sitting in the passenger seat teaching others how to hoon, I feel my palms getting clammy.

It’s not that my co-driver is ham-fisted. On the contrary, he’s a hotshoe from a glossy car mag who’s forgotten more about driving than I’ll ever know. He’s doing everything right: accelerating smoothly, braking perfectly, and avoiding the urge to take every turn sideways. But he’s pushing. Hard. The unhinged sensation that he’s operating above his pay grade continues building until he pulls over and we swap seats.

Within a few minutes at the wheel of the new Corvette Stingray it all makes sense. The level of confidence and clarity felt from the driver’s seat is revelatory. The steering is tight and talkative. The suspension dispatches bumps and undulations with ease and speed, telepathically readying itself for the next set. And that massive lump of a V8 doesn’t just provide extra-legal levels of thrust, it feels composed and controllable. Even refined. Not to mention it sounds like God’s own orchestra playing through a Marshall full stack.

For the first time, the Corvette is a machine that will make a good driver better and a great driver a pavement-dominating deity.

This is not what I was expecting. This is a whole new breed of blue collar supercar. It’s designed to compete with the best the Germans have to offer — and maybe even an Italian or two — and it succeeds. At every level.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. And to understand my initial trepidation with the latest Corvette, you have to understand where it comes from: A long line of half-baked, poorly engineered hack jobs with more style than substance and, later, more brawn than brains.