Meet America’s quickest production car, by the numbers.
Even at the base end of the range, the Chevrolet Corvette Stingray is already a quick car. It hardly scratches the surface as you move up the stack, though, to the point you arrive at the 1,250-horsepower Corvette ZR1X and its claimed sub-2-second 0-60 time. GM hasn’t been screwing around with actually building the ZR1X’s performance cred, though, taking it to the Nürburgring and now, taking it to the drag strip to prove its 0-60 and quarter-mile times. Long story short: They are seriously impressive.
On a stock tune with pump gas, Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires and a typical aero setup, the 2026 Chevy Corvette ZR1X managed a 0-60 time of 1.68 seconds. That is a quick figure, but folks who kept up with the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170 will know that figure doesn’t make the ZR1X America’s quickest production car (although the Challenger is out of production these days). It comes close, but the Demon is a tiny bit quicker (at 1.66 seconds) on a prepped surface in your 0-60 sprint.
But then we get to the quarter-mile time, and that’s where Chevy and Corvette development engineer and driver Stefan Frick turn things on its head. In the quarter-mile run, driver and car clocked an 8.675-second run, at a trap speed of 159 mph. During the testing, Chevy noted, the ZR1X generated 1.75G of acceleration force. Naturally, the team doing the testing made multiple back-to-back quarter-mile runs, all of which came in under 8.8 seconds.
To achieve that sort of speed, Frick used the Corvette’s standard Custom Launch Control setting, which allows the driver to adjust the car’s launch RPM and wheel slip targets. Beyond that, the car will optimize wheelspin, transmission clutch application rate for the 8-speed dual clutch and several other factors to optimize the driver-set factors for the best possible launch conditions.
The Corvette ZR1X can play with cars ten times its price.
No matter which way you slice it, the 2026 Chevy Corvette ZR1X can lay down some seriously impressive performance figures. They’re more impressive still when you note the $209,700 starting price. Yes, that’s expensive for a Corvette, but it’s still miles away from any European supercars that are significantly more expensive. The electric Rimac Nevera R is quicker (7.9s quarter-mile and a 1.66s 0-60, as well as a 186 trap speed), but it also costs $2.5 million. Right down the line, most cars GM is targeting here cost at least ten times more, further buttressing its positioning of the Corvette as a proper supercar for earthly prices mere mortals can actually (sort of) consider.
