We knew the C8 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 – the first ’Vette to leave the factory with turbos strapped to its engine – was going to be fast. At its reveal, Chevy quoted a top speed of ‘over 215mph’. Quite this fast, though? We weren’t expecting that.
A group of Chevy engineers recently decamped to the sprawling Papenburg test track in northwestern Germany, where one of the available facilities is a 7.6-mile high-banked oval – one of the few places you can safely explore the upper reaches of some of the fastest cars in the world.
There, the ZR1 hit 233mph – and not just as a one-off. This was a two-way average speed, which is generally what record adjudicators want to see (that’s the reason that, officially, the 278mph set by the Koenigsegg Agera RS back in 2017 is still the production car speed record – the Bugatti Chiron Super Sport only did its staggering 305mph run in one direction).
Usually, when a car company goes out and does something like this, it’ll pop some steely-eyed ex-racing driver behind the wheel, but this speed was achieved by General Motors President Mark Reuss. Five other engineers were also able to eclipse 230mph in two different test cars.
This makes the ZR1 the fastest ever American production car, and puts it in the leagues occupied not that long ago by stuff with seven-figure price tags. None of this is particularly surprising, though – with 1064bhp and 868lb ft of torque from a 5.5-litre twin-turbo flat-plane crank V8, the ZR1 produces numbers that were the preserve of hypercars until things started getting really silly in the last few years.
The record-setting car was a standard ZR1 running without the ZTK performance pack, which increases downforce but, naturally, also ups the drag. It was running in Top Speed Mode, a setting developed by Chevrolet’s engineers that adjusts the car’s various systems for maximum velocity. It’s not clear if this is something that will feature in production cars.
Regardless, though, that’s really quite something for a car not expected to cost more than the equivalent of around £150,000. What’s perhaps most impressive, though, is that this might not even be the most extreme version of the C8 – that honour’s likely to go to the rumoured hybrid, all-wheel drive Zora version.
