Fans of the Chevy Corvette ZR1 – or indeed any car with an awesome-sounding V8 engine – will love a video recently uploaded to the Drag Racing and Car Stuff channel on YouTube.
We first see the bright red Corvette ZR1 Coupe, which belongs to Instagram user @zr1.f80, as it leaves a gas station. It then turns up at Palm Beach International Raceway, a motorsports complex west of Jupiter, Florida. PBIR has a road course, a kart track and several mud racing tracks, but we’re not going to be seeing any of those. Instead, all of the following action takes place on the drag strip, where the Chevrolet completes four passes, each one proceeded by a lengthy burnout to heat up the Toyo R888R rear tires.
This Corvette ZR1 has replacement upper and lower supercharger pulleys and a Crawford Racing E85 fuel system, among other mods, so it will certainly be making more than the 755 horsepower and 715 pound-feet of torque the 6.2L V8 LT5 is capable of. Sure enough, at its first attempt, the car surges down the quarter-mile in 9.766 seconds, crossing the finish line at 146.48 mph. It sounds like it might be a little quicker if the gearing were slightly different, because there’s quite a rev drop between third and fourth, but 9.766 is certainly motoring in a street-legal car.
The next run is even better. Perhaps the night has become cooler, in which case extra aerodynamic drag caused by the more dense air will be more than compensated for by an increase in power. Or there’s some other reason. Whatever, the Corvette ZR1 now covers the 1,320 feet in 9.615 seconds with a terminal speed of 147.86 mph.
Another try. This one lasts 9.657 seconds, and the car peaks at 146.57 mph. And that’s… okay. If this had been the only run of the night, it would have been something to boast about. But the car went quicker than that only a few minutes ago. How about one more run? Sure, one more run.
The car flies through the traps at 146.43 mph, which sounds impressive but is the slowest of the night. Every other time, it was already doing more than 146.43 mph before it reached the finish. But do we care? Hell, no.
We don’t care because, first of all, terminal speeds don’t matter a damn in drag racing. Oh, they sound impressive, and they can provide useful information to the teams, but you can cross the line at any speed you like and it won’t make any difference because the car that crosses the finish line first is the winner (as long as the driver didn’t leave early or otherwise mess up during the run) and that’s all she wrote.
And, second of all, the Corvette ZR1 has made its quickest pass yet at 9.592 seconds. Sure, that’s only point zero two three better than before, and there’s not a lot you can do in point zero two three. But it means that what used to be a 9.6-second car is now a 9.5-second car, and in the split-second world of drag racing, that’s kind of a big deal.
Except in this case it isn’t, because the Corvette ZR1 has been in the 9.5s already. You can find a link to a video of that happening in the description of the Drag Racing and Car Stuff one shown below.
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Comments
OMG!
It would be interesting to see the list of mods.
https://youtu.be/sIurd1fPERE
Mods in the video description
Best Corvette yet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A little wimpy. At the same track (PBIR) 5 years ago I saw a door slammer, well-modified twin turbocharged Nissan GTR run an 8.5 @ 179 mph. I thought that was unbelievable – couldn’t be beat – until his buddy’s GTR ran 7.9 seconds @ 185 mph the same night. I was surprised that tech inspectors didn’t throw these guys out as there was no compliant safety equipment for those speeds and times.
That same night I also saw that all the well-modified supercharged corvettes and Cadillac CTS-Vs could manage was 9’s and 10’s at speeds as high as 160 mph. I mean, that’s great, but if this ZR-1 Corvette runs up against one of those GTRs, he’s going to look a little slow…
The moral of the story is that the fastest cars are owned by drug dealers who have cubic money to spend. I learned that when I used to live in Detroit and watch street racing.
It’s possible that the Nissans’ AWD might have been a factor.
Absolutely David – AWD helps a lot with Elapsed Time/traction. But note that this article somewhat dismisses speed at the end of the quarter mile as being of little importance since it doesn’t win a race like ET does. But speed IS important. Speed at the end of the quarter mile is a great indicator of engine horsepower. And the high trap speed of those Nissans shows that their engines are really making a lot of it!
Kind of stupid to compare max effort, $100k build GTRs to a simple bolt on street car. This ZR1 isn’t even close to max effort. And these ZR1s have proven to go low to mid 8s. You sound like a casual lol
https://youtu.be/sIurd1fPERE
ZR1’s mods are in the video description. It’s just a basic bolt on street car LOL
Just when they make the Corvette the BEST looking MEANEST ever they changed to mid-engine design. Going to take a long while to get this mid-engine design to mature.
There’s more disappointment to come when Corvette eventually goes all electric… yawn. My advice is to get a good, used 2019 ZR1.
Who cares about your stupid gtr shut up