2015 Corvette Z06 First Customer Quarter Mile Run, Manual Does 11.7s

The 650 hp machine was taken to the Royal Purple Raceway, a strip just outside Houston, Texas. The footage below, which comes from HorsepowerPhotos, shows the drivers bringing the tires up to race-suitable temperature with a good old burnout, subsequently moving on to the Christmas tree fun.

The timing equipment was what many would call mean, showing 11.7 seconds at 120.5 mph (194 km/h). Sure, many would say this is not a bad time for a manual, but we have to remember GM’s official quarter mile time for the three-pedal Z06 sits at 11.2 seconds.

Possible reasons for the half-second “penalty”

Of course, since we’re talking about a stick here, variables such as wheelspin and clutch work can always have a dramatic impact on the final result, but these details are beyond our reach.

Then again, we now know the Z06 has a rather conservative ECU, which has a thing for pulling timing. For instance, in the now-famous 2015 Corvette Z06 vs 2014 Viper TA highway roll race series, the driver of the ‘Vette reported the car’s performance dropped after a number of consecutive runs and it was all due to the aforementioned ECU setup.

It is pretty likely that the Z06 that run the quarter mile hadn’t completed its break in period, which may serve as a serious reason for the ECU to pull timing.

Regardless, we’ll have to wait for more runs in order to draw a conclusion.

In case you haven’t been following the supercar stats recently, we’ll remind you GM claims its engineers whipped the yet-to-arrive-on-the-road automatic Z06 to a 10.95s quarter mile time, so we’re even more eager to see that in action.