Alex 
A Texas tuning shop has broken the record for the world’s fastest C8 Corvette, despite the sports car being notoriously hard to tune. Steven Fereday and his team at Late Model Racecraft took their C8 Corvette fitted with a 1,500 horsepower twin-turbo kit to Texas Speed Syndicate Quick 30 at Houston Raceway Park, and got to work shaving tenths off of their E.T.
They started out strong with a time slip of 9.18 at 153 mph, before dropping more than a tenth with a time of 9.07 at 157 mph. They were getting dangerously close to beating the record, which was previously held by FuelTech USA, who completed the 1/4 mile run with a time slip of 8.973 seconds.
With the record within sight the team set up for a fifth run, and with a marvelous wheelie, the car shot down the strip, finishing the sprint in just 8.95 seconds at 159 mph. However, that wasn’t good enough for the team (who can stop at 159 mph?), and on their sixth run, they smashed their own record with a time of 8.83 seconds at 160 mph.
“It’s been a long journey,” Fereday explains in the video, “but we got there. This car, I literally drive to and from work every day, and also as y’all saw, you can go to the drag strip and run 8’s on the weekend. It’s a phenomenal package for a new car that they say is untunable (with the factory ECM).”
The reason that the C8 is “untunable” is because Chevrolet encrypts the onboard ECU, making it about as hard to get into as Fort Knox. A few tuners have been able to crack the computer, but for those that aren’t as savvy with the microchip-y bits, a kit that can be installed without touching the ECU is a hot commodity.
“To have a car that you can’t fully tune with the stock computer to drive like stock, run like stock, and still put those kind of numbers up is super impressive to me.”
While it’s no doubt an impressive number, the real feat here is the reliability that LMR have managed to retain. 1,500 horsepower is no joke, and to be able to safely drive a vehicle with that much power on the street is nothing short of amazing.
“Now we have a solid package that we can sell to the end user that wants a car that they can just drive (during the week) and show off on the weekends.”
He doesn’t seem totally satisfied, however, and states that a suitable clutch to be able to handle up to 3000 horsepower is still elusive. So perhaps we can expect to see another world record attempt in the near future when the dials get turned up on those turbochargers.
