Let'S get this out of the way right at the start: the 2005 Chevrolet Corvette is the best high-performance bargain on the planet, bar none. There is simply no other way to park a sports car of this caliber in your driveway for less than $45,000.

To wit, when the glossy car magazines look for a worthy challenger to run hot laps against the 'Vette, they tend to pick the venerable Porsche 911 - a car with a base price of $79,895 and actual stickers that usually run much higher.

In these battles, designed to titillate both teenage horsepower hounds and candidates for midlife crises, the Chevy often wins. So it was no surprise that on the pages of the December issues of both Road & Track and Car and Driver, General Motors' tried-and-true two-seater was judged the better car for the money.

By now, track-day geeks, youthful dreamers and the Corvette's legion of fans have all memorized the winning numbers: 8 cylinders, 6 liters of displacement, 400 horsepower, 400 pounds-feet of torque, zero to 60 miles an hour in 4.1 seconds, 12.6 seconds through the quarter-mile, a top speed of 186 miles an hour. (These are all according to Car and Driver; Road & Track came up with slightly slower times.)

To get a little perspective on this slurry of statistics, however, I'd like to throw a third car into the mix. It's an equally iconic steed, my mother's Camry.

While the four-cylinder Toyota is anything but a sports car, it is fully capable of cutting off 911's and 'Vettes on the freeway. One can even imagine the Camry, in the hands of a less adept pilot than Mom, skidding toward a stop before slamming into the substantial plastic-composite rear end of a 'Vette that had just decelerated from 60 m.p.h. to a dead stop in only 114 feet.

The point is, in the real world, the Corvette's numbers matter a lot less than they do in the fantasyland of guys who use "pilgrimage" and "Bowling Green, Ky." in the same sentence. All of today's most potent performance machines - Corvette included - offer levels of power and handling so far beyond what is usable on our increasingly congested road system as to be absurd. Even if you can open the throttle, is there a difference between obliterating the speed limit in 5 seconds rather than 6? Not an important one.

Go ahead and believe in the infallible stopwatch and irrefutable spreadsheet if you must. I distrust numbers-crunching that fails to recognize the subjective qualities that make cars more than mechanical animals. Absolute performance matters far less than purity of design and overall drivability. Call it what you will - the spirit, the soul of the car, the Heartbeat of America - but I'll take this gestalt any day over pulling g's on a skidpad.

In other words, I'm unconvinced that the new Corvette is a great car just because it can literally run circles around 99 percent of what's on the road today.

This is the so-called sixth generation of Chevrolet's halo car (it is thus known as the C6), though it is heavily based on the previous C5 model. Like last year's Corvette, it comes in coupe and convertible body styles in a mostly conventional front-engine, rear-drive layout.

A higher-performance Z06 version of the C6 is due to arrive later this year as a 2006 model. It will be powered by a 7-liter V-8 that makes 500 horsepower and 475 pounds-feet of torque, and will carry other performance enhancements to make it more of a racecar in street clothes.

The C5 was a stellar sports car, which continued a Corvette tradition of major redesigns that took the car in new and mostly better directions. The look of the C6, on the other hand, breaks little ground. It is basically a warmed-over restyle of the C5. This new car makes no overriding design statement, and I get little sense that the development team sat down and probed the really big questions about what a 21st-century Corvette could - and should - be.

While this doesn't make the C6 a bad car - it is certainly not a bad car - it is disappointing that such an opportunity was missed.

The C6 is 5 inches shorter than the C5 and an inch narrower, and it has a 1.5-inch longer wheelbase. This doesn't do too much to change the car's look, but it does significantly improve the Corvette's ride over unfriendly pavement. The new car is less edgy and it is exceedingly comfortable, even when equipped with the optional Z51 performance suspension package.

Indeed, the C6 is one of the best-riding sports cars I have ever driven. It is also roomy, capable of swallowing a driver of almost any size, including those who shop at the big-and-tall store. Its excellent seats are neither too soft nor claustrophobically supportive, and are still a pleasure after an entire day behind the wheel. With the top down, the convertible model has far too much wind buffeting at speed, but that's my only complaint from the cockpit.

There is no problem, either, with the Corvette's V-8, which paints the standard C5's lily with 50 extra horses. Acceleration is effortless, as expected, though steering effort is anything but light. The only thing wider than the steering wheel is the car's turning circle, making "nimble" the last adjective you'd use to describe this beast. Of course, it would be unimaginable for the Corvette suddenly to become a dainty little sports car, so the heft and brawn of the C6 are as welcome as they are familiar.

In fact, the C6 mimics the C5 in so many ways as to be almost entirely without its own personality.

The C5's main vices were a cheap, monochromatic interior and a large, unbecoming rear end. Designers sought to address these issues, though the results are middling.

The interior has been "upgraded" with the sort of faux-luxury plastic finishes now common on sub-$20,000 cars like the Scion tC and Chevrolet's own Cobalt. The result makes me appreciate the lack of pretension in the C5, whose dashboard would have looked at home in a Silverado pickup.

The big-booty issue was tackled in part by shortening the car, which reduced its rear overhang. The haunches and deck lid were given a more sculptured look, though the effect is like cinching the belt of your pants tighter to rein in a beer gut.

Given the failures in rectifying these big complaints with the C5, it's hard to believe that G.M. managed to screw up one of the Corvette's best features - its svelte, tapered nose. By ditching the concealed headlights that have graced every Corvette since 1963, and adding a long, horizontal open-air intake to the fascia, the C6 has gained what Chevy calls a "stronger" face. Or, if you prefer, a beady-eyed lizard.

The rest of the styling changes are of the nip-and-tuck variety and become apparent only when C6 is parked next to C5. What's really obvious then is how much more organic the old design was. You can tell someone actually drew that car, imperfect as its shape may be, while the new Corvette looks as if it had its genesis in Photoshop.

Though the C6, with its longer wheelbase and shorter length, has better overall proportions, I'll still take the C5. Not only does it look meaner, but less like a generic amalgam of influences from other cars.

I can understand that G.M. wanted to stick with what works, and there are worse directions it could have taken than creating this "C5½." The old car was (and still is) an impressive machine. In its 405-horsepower Z06 trim, the C5 was just as capable of generating numbers to make the fan boys drool. There are myriad ways in which the C6 could have been improved, but wasn't.

The Corvette still employs a conventional four-speed automatic transmission while virtually every other sports car on earth has adopted some sort of shift-yourself automatic or Formula One manual activated by paddles or buttons around the steering wheel. It is disappointing that the 'Vette still doesn't offer any of these modern gearboxes.

Would it be heresy to suggest that G.M. might have considered a wholesale reinvention of the Corvette? That perhaps the C6 should have an all-wheel-drive system like the one in the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, a fellow member of the 4-Point-Something-to-60-M.P.H. Club? While a hybrid-drive system was clearly never on the drawing board - G.M. has no such deployable technology - wouldn't it have been cool to see the Corvette break this ground?

Perhaps these two suggestions are equally stupid and unrealistic, but the point is simple: there are not enough new ideas in this car. Only once or so in a decade does G.M. redefine the Corvette. You'd think that even in lieu of a clean-sheet design, it might have come up with innovations beyond an optional navigation system. But the new Corvette is still pretty much the same old car with many of the same old annoyances.

Among these is the six-speed manual's skip-shift "feature," which forces drivers to shift from first to fourth gear at low speed. This trick provides a bump in mileage ratings, keeping the car free of a guzzler tax, but that hardly justifies such an intrusive system - especially since owners routinely disable it with a $20 after-market part.

In too many ways, the car feels forced together out of disparate parts or components that were not particularly well thought out. The steering column has two separate adjustment controls: a one-axis joystick for its telescoping function and a lever to adjust the tilt. Surely another company would have found a way to combine both functions in a two-axis control.

Similarly, the power convertible top isn't entirely automatic - it must still be unlatched by hand. Much of the competition, including lesser sports cars like the BMW Z4, have one-button automatic tops.

These throwbacks should not be surprising, given that most of this 'Vette was defined a decade ago. The rest, including a problematic keyless entry and ignition system (with electronic door handles) is a result of the C6's being co-developed with the Cadillac XLR luxury roadster.

I have had problems with both cars' failure to identify the radio transmitter in the keyfob, forcing me to go through the tedious process of unlocking the car with the key. Since there are no keyholes in the doors, this requires fiddling with a concealed lock at the rear of the car, then a further effort to convince a sensor to "see" the fob so the engine can be started.

The bottom line is that you can find yourself sitting 15 minutes in a parking lot, frustrated with a new technology that offers no more convenience than the previous system. This does provide some time to contemplate what this whiz-bang superfluity is doing in the Corvette in the first place.

Sadly, we already know the answer. G.M. has only so much money to spend developing cars, and some of it had to be sunk into the XLR, which shares its architecture with the C6 Corvette. Now I'm not saying that G.M. robbed Peter to pay Paul, but it's clear that Cadillac's sports car influenced the C6's parameters as much as anything.

I won't judge whether this was the right move - Cadillac's turnaround is certainly G.M.'s greatest success of the last 20 years - but I will say that I like the XLR a lot.

And despite my carping and criticizing, I like the new Corvette, too. It's a lot of fun to drive. And as all the world already realizes, it offers unmatched bang for the buck.

But I want more than a fast car at an attainable price. I expect more from the caretakers of this icon - America's Sports Car, as it's called. I long for a Corvette in which every surface, every part, every angle and ultimately every decision contribute to the creation of the perfect sports car.

I don't expect G.M. - or any automaker, for that matter - to succeed in this impossible task, but in the trying comes the possibility of creating a very special car. The new Corvette, unfortunately, isn't it.

INSIDE TRACK: To have and have not.

The look of the C6, on the other hand, breaks little ground. It is basically a warmed-over restyle of the C5. This new car makes no overriding design statement, and I get little sense that the development team sat down and probed the really big questions about what a 21st-century Corvette could - and should - be.