Chevy Whips Up a Pair of Badass Drag Racing Camaros
A new COPO car for annihilating drag strips now—and a development car to help create the racing Camaros of tomorrow.
If you're one of those Dominic Toretto types who lives life a quarter-mile at a time—well, today's your lucky day. Chevrolet has revealed not one but two new Camaros designed for drag racing.
The car seen here laying down a nasty burnout, which is on on display at this year's SEMA show in Las Vegas, is Chevy's drag race development Camaro, which has been put to use as the ultimate test bed for current-generation Camaro performance parts. Packed with a heavily-modified LT1 engine from the Camaro SS, it puts out around 600 horsepower, thanks to tweaks like a cam-and-heads package and a power adder, and is capable of running the quarter-mile in 10.685 seconds at 125.73 mph.
The other of the two cars, the new COPO drag racer, marks the first factory-built 2017 Chevy Camaro race car, designed as the ultimate NHRA Stock Eliminator drag car that GM engineers could develop from the new Camaro. The COPO Camaro, also sitting at SEMA, offers the choice of three V8 motors: a supercharged 5.7-liter engine, a naturally-aspirated 7.0-liter engine, or a direct-injected 6.2-liter engine. All come mated to a ATI TH400 three-speed automatic transmission, and are fueled with a high-pressure fuel pump.
The car is carried down quarter-mile drag strips by an adjustable coil-over suspension setup in the front, and a four-link suspension with adjustable coil-overs in the rear; an unassisted, lightweight four-wheel disc brake system handles stopping. The COPO Camaro also its own wiring harness, as well as a solid rear-axle system instead of the road-going Camaro's independent rear-axle.
The SEMA car, which is number 1 out of 69 examples, will be put on the auction block at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale in January 2017. Proceeds from the sale will go to the United Way. Folks who are looking to buy one of the other COPO examples must register with Chevy before December 15th; those other 68 cars will be allocated at random.
