Hennessey Performance’s new 1,000-horsepower Chevy Camaro ZL1 known as “The Exorcist” is, at least on one level, a publicity stunt designed to capitalize on the tsunami of attention being attracted by the Dodge Demon—but it’s exactly the kind of publicity stunt we at The Drive love. Taking the 650-horsepower supercharged V8 of the stock Camaro ZL1 and dialing it up an extra 54 percent likely won’t do all that much for performance at legal speeds, but the sheer concept alone is ludicrously cool enough to make up for the lack of practical reasons to add that extra power. (And that’s not even mentioning the burnouts.)
But any tuned muscle car worth its salt needs some hard evidence to back up those outlandish numbers. So Hennessey brought The Exorcist over to the dynamometer to see just how much of those reported 1,000-plus ponies are making their way to the massive rear wheels and tires.
And it’s 959 of ’em.
The Hennessey Exorcist Camaro ZL1, as it turns out, makes 959 wheel horsepower and 756 pound-feet of torque at the tires. Assuming this Chevy suffers from the usual drivetrain power losses for a modern car of around 10 percent (we know it varies between the single digits and 20 percent depending on the car, we’re just using that 10 percent figure as a general ballpark), the Exorcist is likely making close to 1,100 hp at the crank. Will that be enough to whip the Demon when Hennessey inevitably pits them against each other at the drag strip? We’ll have to wait and see.
