When you make a car lighter, more powerful, and pack more technology into it there’s an expectation of increased performance but the boys at Chevrolet may have really out done themselves this time. The 2017 Camaro ZL1 recently ripped off a 7:29 lap around the famed Nurburgring in Germany. That blows the previous ZL1 out of the water by a literal shade under 12-seconds and it is three seconds quicker around the course than the Ford Mustang GT350R. That’s right where the engineers wanted to be in relation to the Ford but it is kind of shocking the thing is that much better than the previous ZL1…or is it?
The new car is something like 200lbs lighter than the old one, makes 70 more horsepower (650 is the advertised figured and boy does it look like it), and makes more than 90 extra lb-ft of torque than it did before you can see where the improvements are coming from. The gazillion speed automatic transmission is what this car was equipped with and while it sounds like a scene out of the Fast and Furious movie franchise, the beauty of althaea gear shifting is the fact that the engine is living right in the wheelhouse of its torque band and the thing comes off the corners awesomely.
An additional note on the transmission. When you hear it shifting and doing its thing, that is not the driver operating the paddles, that is the trans doing it all by itself. Chevrolet wanted to show that the thing is capable of learning and adapting in track mode with its “adaptive algorithm” doing the thinking and the math when it comes to shifting. Don’t freak out. There will be a six speed manual transmission available as well. You don’t have to get stuck with the automatic but by the looks of things, it ain’t a bad gear changer at all!
nice…
The performance is STAGGERING!!! Man I can’t believe how well it works!
But the 10 speed auto just blows me away!! I’m a diehard manual shift guy, I just enjoy shifting the gears when I want them to be shifted.
But this new 10sp auto is spot on! Crisp shifts, exactly when they’re needed! I totally dig it!
Hopefully some of this tech trickles down into more pedestrian cars and trucks….? Can you imagine rolling your new 2wd regular cab short bed Silverado rev matching 10sp auto through town with a good sounding set of pipes…? I CAN!!
Unbelievable the shifting is so crisp and…..automatic! Great performance all the way around the track with that top speed on the long straight of 181mph would love to drive that course in this car. The advances made in automotive technology over the last 20 years are staggering.
I had to watch it once just listening to the motor and watching just the rpm. Amazing shifting transmission, it never went out of the powerband!
Holy s… Batman! Do we really grasp just how fast this thing is? The speeds actually made my butt pucker up just watching the video.
He’s on the ragged edge. One miss step and it’s over.. A good run…
378 cubic inch super charged mill with 120 more hp then the n.a 317 inch gt350 R,and being a bit lighter too,It better get around the course in 3 sec or better,Now keep in mind out of three secs are the weather conditions identical,? Same tire conditions and exact same driver ability,Id say you could shave off at least a sec and change with those variables if you were to race both cars on the same day with equal driving ability.None the less the car looks fun.
One thing about that GT350R Nurburgring time is that Ford has never released a Nurburgring laptime for the GT350R, there is no video of it (the lap) either, it was originally posted by the fake car-news website HorsepowerKings, as far as any real lap comparisons of the cars Car and Driver does their Lightning Lap at Virginia International Raceway every year and they did run the GT350R this year, at the bottom of the page I linked shows the Historical laptimes from the Lightning Laps and includes the 2015 Z/28……
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/lightning-lap-2016-results-historical-lap-times-and-more-feature