Manoli Katakis 
Hennessey Performance Engineering shared a video late last night of a new C8 Corvette fitted with a pair of turbochargers. The gullible and the uninitiated would perhaps assume that this would mean that Hennessey was able to – with little to no effort at all – penetrate the cybersecurity fortress of the car’s ECU and Global B electronics architecture. This would effectively silence any and all naysayers. Except the opposite has happened when HPE released its video of the twin turbo C8 Corvette. They’ve been vindicated.
Keen eyes were quick to point out some of the discrepancies with the twin turbo C8 Corvette.
“The car only has the turbos mounted to the exhaust headers. No intercooler, the car is still NA with exhaust whistles,” noticed one commenter. “It’s not tuned at all and the turbos aren’t plumbed to the intake. This is literally just to make cool turbo spooly noises on YouTube,” wrote another.
The below video of the twin turbo C8 Corvette shows only the vehicle starting up, followed by a couple of throttle blips to get a spools to make noise. The car is able to roll under its own power. But any real demonstration – a dyno test, a speed run, or hot lap – seems far, far away.
A well-placed source of ours described that this C8 Corvette can likely “run and putz around.” But with any high-power pulls, the setup will cause “serious damage” without tuning. We’ve seen the first examples of what that looks like earlier this week, with some cowboy drag strip efforts involving the C8, a tank of nitrous, and a snapped rear axle.
Previously, Hennessey mentioned that it will likely need help from General Motors to actually access the 2020 Corvette Stingray ECU and perform any kind of actual tuning. And despite the dubious video, we can think of a few more upstanding tuning companies that are closer to the front of the line than HPE when it comes to who GM wants to work with.
