GM has only started shipping 2015 Corvette Z06 units late last year and yet the blown ‘Vette has already offered us plenty of entertainment, from racing Vipers to battling the ZR1 on the dyno. Nonetheless, we have to admit that while the Viper race was the more relevant one, we’d been secretly dying to see the Z06 battle it out with the Hellcat.
Well, ladies and gentlemen drivers, the footage below brings us a highway fight between the 2015 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 and the 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. The two slabs of America pulled three consecutive races, with the result being the same on all the runs.
In theory, the almost 1,000 lbs weight advantage of the Corvette should give it the edge - we’ll remind you both pack supercharged 6.2-liter V8s delivering 650 lb-ft of torque (881 Nm), while the 707 hp of the muscle car top the 650 horses of the supercar.
Nonetheless, in the real world, the Hellcat walked the Z06 - we have to advise you to ignore the title of the video. “Annihilation” is an exaggeration and you'll understand this once you watch the clip. Then again, the labeling shouldn’t surprise us, since the footage was captured from the Hellcat.
“We did three rolls between 45-50 mph, and [the Hellcat] honked on all of them. On each run I spun the tires and went sideways when I smashed the throttle in second gear. That is why he got the jump on me every time. The first time I stopped at around 85 mph, and around 100-110 mph the next two races. They wanted to find an empty road somewhere for some dig runs, but I didn’t want to because it would’ve been even less traction than when I raced him at the strip,” the owner of the Z06 said on the Corvette Forum.
The conclusion is not that simple
We’re not sure about the Challenger, but the Corvette was a manual, so the human factor had quite an importance. Moreover, we’ll remind you that after the video of the Z06 being beaten by a 2014 Viper TA went viral, a second video appeared, showing the same Viper being left trailing in another Z06’s wake, so this type of highway racing can’t exactly lead to precise conclusions.
Moreover, we all know the 2015 Corvette Z06 has a conservative ECU that pulls power quite often and this could have been the case here, due to multiple possible factors - perhaps the car hadn’t been broken in or maybe the repeated runs determined the ECU do to that.
Just don't take the arson image below, which was taken by the Corvette guy, too seriously.
In his quest to bring you the most impressive automotive creations, Andrei relies on learning as a superpower. There's quite a bit of room in the garage that is this aficionado's heart, so factory-condition classics and widebody contraptions with turbos poking through the hood can peacefully coexist. Full profile
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