GM’s newest sports car tops 1,000 horsepower

Detroit — General Motors The latest Chevrolet Corvette will be the most powerful version of the American sports car ever produced — and it’s not even close.

The 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 will be equipped with a twin-turbo 5.5-liter V8 engine that will produce more than 1,000 horsepower and 828 foot-pounds of torque — a first for a Corvette — and will join the ranks of supercars costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Detroit automaker announced Thursday.

“This car pulls like a freight train,” Tadge Jeuctor, Corvette’s executive chief engineer since 2006, said at a media event. “This car will be the fastest car we’ve ever built, hands down.”

The most powerful Corvette to date was GM’s last ZR1, available for 2019. It was powered by a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 making 755 horsepower and 715 foot-pounds of torque.

Juechter said the new ZR1’s top speed will be “easily” higher than the Corvette’s previous top speed of 212 mph.

GM said pricing for the 2025 Corvette ZR1, which includes the additional “ZTK” performance package, will be announced closer to the start of production next year. Pricing for the 2019 Corvette ZR1 starts at $121,000.

The ZR1 joins what GM calls the “Corvette family,” which includes the Corvette Stingray “sports car for the masses” that starts at about $70,000, the hybrid E-Ray and the Z06 track car, which costs about $112,000.

“We’re pleased with the progress we’ve made. This is the next step in this entire effort,” said Brad Franz, Chevrolet’s director of car and crossover marketing.

GM previously confirmed an all-electric Corvette would be released but didn’t say when. A Corvette SUV has also been in discussion for several years. Franz declined to comment on either vehicle.

Wall Street analysts have said GM could better leverage the Corvette brand by expanding its model range and, to some extent, sales. In late 2019, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said the Corvette sub-brand could be worth between $7 billion and $12 billion.

Chevrolet Corvette sales were around 34,500 units in each of the past two years, and in 2019, the automaker redefined the iconic sports car, swapping out its front-engine design for a mid-engine configuration to improve performance and handling.

Models such as the ZR1 are low-volume production vehicles designed to draw attention to the brand and entice drivers to the less expensive Corvette.

“The ZR1 is our top-of-the-line model, our flagship model. It will generate a lot of attention and help sell other models,” Juechter said. “It’s part of our ongoing business strategy to keep this product relevant over its relatively long life cycle.”

Thanks to other high-performance models, the average transaction price for a Corvette has risen to roughly $106,000.

Franz said he expects the price point to continue to rise with the introduction of the ZR1 and increased sales of the track-focused Z06, whose average household income is $311,000.

Additional sales of the hybrid Corvette, which starts at about $105,000, should also help boost Corvette profits.GM plans to increase E-Ray production to 10 percent from 2 to 3 percent now, Franz said.

The trickle-down effect of performance has also helped keep the only factory that produces Corvettes, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, running a double shift since 2019.