Corvette Stingray Coupe

Make
Chevrolet
Segment
Coupe

Hennessey Performance is a company known for many things, like the Lotus Elise-based Venom GT that beat the Bugatti Veyron's top speed recprd, or the upcoming Venom F5 hypercar. It's also known for insane tuning packages for America's greatest machines, with the tagline "Making fast cars faster since 1991" ring truer than ever in the modern era where they'll give you 1,000 horsepower in just about anything you ask of them.

But today we see something a little different from the Texas-based company in the form of a stock-vs-stock drag race of two of America's greats. Before Hennessey gets to tuning the C8 Corvette - equipping it with a twin-turbo setup and 1,200 hp - it's stacked the mid-engined 'Vette up against a Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat Widebody.

On paper, the Hellcat is an easy winner, employing a supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8 up front developing up to 717 horsepower in Daytona Edition guise and 650 lb-ft of torque. It routes this power to the rear wheels via an eight-speed automatic gearbox and manages the 0-60 mph sprint in a claimed 3.6 seconds, with the widebody version wearing broader, stickier rubber to help gain extra traction and give it the ability to handle corners better.

By contrast, the C8-generation Corvette has switched over to a mid-engine layout, and until such time as we see an 850-hp ZR1 in 2024, the current Stingray derivative seems like a woeful underdog. Its naturally aspirated 6.2-liter V8 develops just 495 hp and 470 lb-ft of torque, but thanks to the placement of the engine, it benefits from big traction off the line and can run the 0-60 mph gauntlet in just 2.9 seconds.

Hennessey Performance placed the two alongside one another in two drag races - one from a standing start and one rolling from 40 mph - to see how the two machines fared against one another. While the standing start race favors traction over power, the rolling race is remarkably closing, proving once again just how important the shift to a mid-engine platform is for the supercar.