When GM North American President Mark Reuss stopped by our offices with the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, he told us that while the ZL1 was almost production ready, there was still some last minute testing to be done, including putting over a quarter-million miles on the ZL1 before it’s ready for primetime. Chevy recently spent some time, 24 hours to be exact, racking up the miles by running the Camaro ZL1 continuously on the Milford Road Course for final tweaks and calibrations.
As one Chevy engineer so helpfully puts it, “There’s nothing more destructive on a car than [24 hours on a racetrack].” He’s right; often times purpose built endurance racecars can’t endure the rigors and challenges of pushing a car at 110 percent for 24 hours. How’s a pre-production street car supposed to withstand that without breaking?
Well, luckily for the Camaro ZL1, GM’s goal was to break the car so that they could learn what went wrong and fix it before an unlucky customer did the same thing. “The whole idea of the test is to break the car,” said another Chevy engineer, “So it’s not necessarily a failure when we’ve broken something on the car. We want to make sure we break it before a customer goes out, tries to duplicate what we’re doing, and breaks it themselves.”
Aside from some insight from Chevrolet’s engineers on testing the Camaro ZL1, we also get a closer look at some of the hardware that differentiates the ZL1 from the lesser Camaro SS. Some of those upgrades include things like a new differential cooler, stronger half shafts, and a dual-mode exhaust. The Camaro ZL1 will finally hit showrooms in late spring.
