New C8 Corvette ZR1 hits 233mph top speed
Chevrolet’s 1064bhp supercar hit 233mph with GM boss Mark Reuss at the wheel. And 230+ wasn’t a one-off
The C8 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 has become by some margin the fastest car you can buy for under £1million, cracking 233mph in a test at ATP Automotive Testing in Papenburg, Germany. At the wheel was not a Le Mans winner, but the kind of person the Corvette C8 ZR1 is aimed at: a company boss. In this case, General Motors President Mark Reuss.
It wasn’t a freak one-off run either, with repeated testing seeing the ZR1 regularly top the 230mph barrier. To set the speed, the ZR1 was put into what GM calls ‘top speed mode’, which adjusts the chassis control systems for high-speed running. It’s not clear if this will be a mode available to ZR1 buyers. The 233mph run was achieved by holding the ZR1 in sixth gear – leaving the two ‘highway’ gears untouched – up to the redline.
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The car was wearing the standard alloy wheels rather than the carbon items, shod in Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tyres as opposed to the optional Michelin Cup 2 Rs. It didn’t feature the ZTK package, which adds a bigger wing, instead keeping the standard chassis package with the lower wing. Even so, at top speed, Chevrolet claims it was producing 544kg of downforce.
The ZR1 sports some fairly spectacular numbers that mean it can hit such speeds, principally the 1,064bhp peak power figure. The LT7 5.5-litre twin-turbo V8 produces maximum power at 7,000rpm, with the BorgWarner 76mm turbos being the largest fitted to a passenger car. To keep them on the boil as and when they need to be, the ZR1 features an intelligent anti-lag system.
While the LT6 5.5-litre V8 in the Z06 took the title of the most powerful naturally-aspirated V8 in the world, producing 670bhp, the 1064bhp LT7 is the most powerful production V8 ever produced in America.
