First Test: 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 Enters Another Dimension

Car and Driver

2 days ago

In C/D's exclusive first instrumented test, the new ZR1 hit 60 mph in 2.2 seconds.
It also blasted through the quarter-mile in 9.5 seconds at 149 mph.
Those numbers make this Corvette ZR1 the quickest rear-wheel-drive car we've ever tested.
A thousand horsepower makes a particular sound. It's a compact tornado ripping across the plains, a 30-foot swell curling across a shore break, an airlock blowing out in deep space. It's the sound of a placid afternoon breeze that was minding its own business until the 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 showed up, its twin ball-bearing turbos cramming up to 26.1 psi of boost into its LT7 5.5-liter V-8. The ZR1 is rated at a strangely specific 1064 horsepower at 7000 rpm, and you'd guess that GM aimed for an even thousand and overshot the mark. That's not the case. The horsepower goal was simply "as much as possible," and it turns out that the envelope of possibility extends to four-digit output, a 233-mph top speed, and a yet-undisclosed Nürburgring Nordschleife lap time that's likely to embarrass the $300,000-plus Mustang GTD more than a little. For a frame of reference, this year's Indy 500 qualifying average speed was 231 mph, and you can't buy Álex Palou's Dallara for a starting price of $178,195 at your local Chevy dealer.
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
Strap In
It would be disingenuous to claim that the ZR1's performance is easily accessible. When you first climb in, it's best to treat the accelerator pedal the way a bomb-squad crew treats a wired-up bundle of explosives—careful, careful, lest you trigger the boom. Perhaps the ZR1's most important instrument-cluster display is the tire temperature readout, which gleans its information from the TPMS sensors. If the display is blue, that means you'd best not show off while leaving Cars & Coffee. If it's green, that means you'd still best not show off while leaving Cars & Coffee, but your power-oversteer spin will happen slightly farther down the road. If it's red, you're a hero because that means you drove hard enough to actually make the tires hot.
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
HIGHS: Straight-line performance of the gods, aero upgrades, typical excellent Corvette value.
We drove the ZR1 at GingerMan Raceway in Michigan, and the morning began with cold rain. That provided a good opportunity to confirm that a rear-wheel-drive car with 1064 horsepower and 828 pound-feet of torque, wearing Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R tires ("not recommended for driving in wet conditions," per Tire Rack), is not ideal on a chilly, damp day. The ZR1 on wet pavement feels like a normal car on snow, with the front tires washing wide on tight corners at barely more than 30 mph, and the 345/25ZR-21 rears flaring into wheelspin at perhaps 25 percent throttle. Fortunately for us, the skies cleared, the track dried, and eventually the ZR1 got to demonstrate its talents.
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
Shrinks Racetracks
GingerMan is a fairly compact circuit—2.1 miles—but the ZR1 is going to make every track feel tight. It's a cheetah let loose in a Chuck E. Cheese, an F-22 flying combat maneuvers in your grandma's attic, a Tyson Fury title fight held in an elevator. The ZR1's acceleration is so explosive that it's hard to find a frame of reference, but let's try. The 2006 Corvette Z06, with its 505-hp LS7 engine, hit 60 mph in 3.6 seconds. The 2025 ZR1 is almost that quick over the next 60 mph—it runs 60 to 120 mph in 3.9 seconds. In 23.8 seconds, you're at 200 mph. And that's with the optional giant rear wing slowing it down. Powering out of GingerMan's penultimate right-hand corner onto the long straight, you head uphill before the track flattens out, and the ZR1's accelerative ferocity makes that gentle transition feel like a launch ramp, the car going just a little bit light over the crest. In just about any other car, there is no crest right there, just a barely discernible transition to flatness. But behind the wheel of the ZR1, reality warps to the power.
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
And that power is usable right off the line. The ZR1's 2.2-second 60-mph time is the best number we've ever seen from a rear-wheel-drive car and matches the all-wheel-drive Porsche 911 Turbo S. The Corvette's launch control is very clever, and very adjustable—our best results came with a 3500-rpm launch at 10 percent slip. There's a burnout mode to clean off the tires, which is both useful and a crowd-pleasing warm-up to perform before cracking off a 9.5-second quarter-mile at 149 mph. Mind you, that result was on an unprepped surface. At a drag strip sticky with traction compound, there's surely more to be had.
LOWS: Needs a bigger gas tank, normcore interior, brakes and handling don't make proportional gains.
Not that this is a drag car, even. The ZR1 is optimized for destroying road-course lap records, especially when fitted with the $1500 ZTK Performance package (magnetic selective ride control and the Cup 2Rs), $13,995 carbon-fiber wheels, and the $8495 Carbon Fiber Aero package. You'll know the aero package by its enormous rear wing, which helps the ZR1 generate more than 1200 pounds of downforce. Up front, the Corvette's forward trunk is sacrificed for cooling and aero, with air flowing up from under the car and through the hood. There are also brake-cooling ducts on the rear fenders and, above those, more ducts to feed cool air to the turbos. Those are the obvious ZR1 tells, but if you're still unsure what you're looking at, the split rear window is the definitive signifier of a ZR1. Besides nodding to the C2 split-window from 1963, the center panel is vented to provide yet more cooling.
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
As the tires warmed up and the track dried out, we began to realize that the ZR1's outsized thrust dictates a particular driving style—quick hands, early on the brakes, but stoic with the throttle until the steering is unwound. It's helpful that the LT7 provides all manner of aural feedback on its state of readiness, but basically you can assume it's ready to pounce within a fraction of a second. The turbos are integrated into the exhaust manifolds and have their own speed sensors, with the engine management system always striving to keep the turbines spooled up. Even when you abruptly back off the throttle, you hear a lingering screeee as the turbos keep spinning, a high-pitched overlay to the LT7's guttural flat-plane howl. GM knew, when it was developing the Z06's naturally aspirated LT6, that there would be a turbocharged version, so the LT7 was optimized for its mission from day one, with a new intake, strengthened pistons and connecting rods, and a whole extra port fuel-injection system complementing the direct-injection setup.
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
You might infer, from the dual fuel-injection systems, that the LT7 swills gas, and you'd be right. In fact, the ZR1's voracious thirst and relatively small 18.5-gallon fuel tank will be the constraining factors in track-day shenanigans. We weren't trying to set any lap records, and still the ZR1 managed barely 50 miles before demanding a pit stop. One tank that included the five-mile drive back from the gas station netted less than 4 mpg. Out on the street, the EPA reckons you'll see 12 mpg city and 18 mpg highway, hence a mandatory $3000 gas-guzzler tax. While it's a fine practice to occasionally pit in and let the red mist dissipate, the ZR1 insists you do that on a regular basis.
That's for the best, we think, because the ZR1's historic leap in horsepower doesn't come with commensurate gains in braking and cornering—how could it? The ZR1's 1.13 g's on the skidpad is, of course, a top-of-the-food-chain number, but still not quite as good as the 1.16 g's we saw from the Z07-equipped Z06. (At 3831 pounds, the ZR1 weighed in at 165 pounds more than the Z06, an admirably minor gain, but still a gain.) And although the ZR1 gets upsized 15.7-inch front brake rotors, the largest ever fitted to a Corvette, its braking performance mirrors the Z06's: Stopping from 70 mph requires 140 feet of pavement, and 100 mph is scrubbed in 273 feet, compared with 139 feet and 274 feet for the Z06.
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
The interior, too, is a doppelgänger for the Z06, if not the base Stingray. There's a boost gauge and a ZR1-specific Top Speed mode, which basically tells the stability control that you plan to go extremely fast in a straight line, but the base 1LZ interior on our test car is standard-issue Corvette. Our test car was very superleggera, lacking even heated seats, but who needs creature comforts when you've got 1064 horsepower? That should occupy your full attention.
How We Got Here
It's tempting to look ahead and ponder the Corvette team's next move—hey, what if you combined the E-Ray's hybrid all-wheel drive with the ZR1's engine?—but we think the ZR1 merits a moment to reflect on how incredible it is that this car exists. Back in the bankruptcy-era days of the 638-hp C6 ZR1, Chevy wasn't even sure if it could improve on the 505-hp Z06's 60-mph time because the rear tires were already at their limit all the way through first gear. Then Michelin worked some magic, and the ZR1 shaved off a few tenths. But at the time, 638 horsepower was all the Corvette could handle and then some.
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
The seventh-generation Vette brought the 650-hp Z06 and the 755-hp ZR1. As one Corvette engineer told us, "You'd drive the Z06 for a week and think, 'Eh, it could use another hundred horsepower.' You never drive a ZR1 and think it could use another hundred horsepower." And yet, here we are. They added another hundred horsepower. And another hundred after that, and another hundred after that. And then nine more for good measure.
Prior super-Vettes, as good as they were, played by rules established in 1953: front engine, rear drive, and (almost) always a pushrod V-8. The new ZR1's sole guiding ideology is the pursuit of maximum capability, and so it makes an exponential leap in performance—who'd have thought that 755 horsepower would ever seem quaint, let alone so soon?
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Michael Simari
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Car and Driver
The benchmarks are moving fast. The 1990 ZR-1's 375 horsepower, so staggering in its day, is now considered a normal output for a family SUV. Will 1064 horsepower ever seem normal? We doubt it, but if you're stout enough to want a taste of that future, the ZR1 is ready right now. As for whether you're ready for it, there's only one way to find out.
VERDICT: Chevy builds an earthbound rocket.
Specifications
Specifications
2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1
Vehicle Type: mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 2-door targa
PRICE
Base/As Tested: $178,195/$205,265
Options: carbon-fiber wheels, $13,995; ZR1 Carbon Fiber Aero package, $8495; ZTK Performance package, $1500; Competition sport bucket seats, $995; body-colored split-window trim, $995; microsuede-wrapped steering wheel, $695; black exhaust tips, $395
ENGINE
twin-turbocharged and intercooled DOHC 32-valve V-8, aluminum block and heads, port and direct fuel injection
Displacement: 333 in3, 5463 cm3
Power: 1064 hp @ 7000 rpm
Torque: 828 lb-ft @ 6000 rpm
TRANSMISSION
8-speed dual-clutch automatic
CHASSIS
Suspension, F/R: control arms/control arms
Brakes, F/R: 15.7-in vented, cross-drilled carbon-ceramic disc/15.4-in vented, cross-drilled carbon-ceramic disc
Tires: Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R ZP
F: 275/30ZR-20 (97Y) TPC
R: 345/25ZR-21 (104Y) TPC
DIMENSIONS
Wheelbase: 107.2 in
Length: 185.9 in
Width: 79.7 in
Height: 48.6 in
Passenger Volume: 51 ft3
Trunk Volume: 9 ft3
Curb Weight: 3831 lb
C/D TEST RESULTS
60 mph: 2.2 sec
100 mph: 4.5 sec
130 mph: 7.1 sec
1/4-Mile: 9.5 sec @ 149 mph
150 mph: 9.7 sec
170 mph: 13.1 sec
200 mph: 23.8 sec
Results above omit 1-ft rollout of 0.2 sec.
Rolling Start, 5–60 mph: 3.0 sec
Top Gear, 30–50 mph: 1.8 sec
Top Gear, 50–70 mph: 2.0 sec
Top Speed (mfr claim): 225 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 140 ft
Braking, 100–0 mph: 273 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft Skidpad: 1.13 g
C/D FUEL ECONOMY
Observed, Track/Street: 4/13 mpg
EPA FUEL ECONOMY
Combined/City/Highway: 14/12/18 mpg
C/D TESTING EXPLAINED
Reviewed by
Ezra Dyer
Senior Editor
Ezra Dyer is a Car and Driver senior editor and columnist. He's now based in North Carolina but still remembers how to turn right. He owns a 2009 GEM e4 and once drove 206 mph. Those facts are mutually exclusive.
Tested by
David Beard
Managing Testing Editor
David Beard studies and reviews automotive related things and pushes fossil-fuel and electric-powered stuff to their limits. His passion for the Ford Pinto began at his conception, which took place in a Pinto.