Camaro ZL1 Coupe

Make
Chevrolet
Segment
Coupe

These days, you can get a positively stupid amount of horsepower for relatively cheap, especially if you drive one of the Big Three's forced induction muscle cars. Turn $55,000 of your hard-earned money over to Hennessey Performance Engineering, and they'll transform your Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE with their beastly 1,000-horsepower Exorcist package, for instance.

But any time you turn up the wick on a factory car's performance, you take on a good amount of risk. OEMs engineer their cars with a durability margin built-in, but as it's never clear exactly how great the margin is, it's very possible to exceed it.

Enter Callaway Cars, which builds the "most powerful Camaro you can buy new with a full factory warranty."

Callaway Cars has a long and impressive history as a specialty vehicle manufacturer, with a particular knack for cranking up the performance on General Motors products like the Camaro and Corvette. Perhaps that's why GM allows the company to peddle its tuned-up Camaros through Chevrolet's US dealer network, and why the company can boast impressive warranty coverage.

Based on the 650-horsepower Camaro ZL1, the Camaro in question - the 2020 Callaway SC750 - produces 100 more horsepower than in stock form, yielding 0-60 mph in 3.2 seconds and an 11.0-second quarter-mile at 128 mph, according to the company's own tests.

To achieve that, Callaway doesn't just slap a smaller pulley on the factory blower and call it a day, rather, the company fits the ZL1 with a high-flow intake and its trademark GenThree supercharger packaged with its TripleCooled intercooler system. That "triple cooling" is made possible by the supercharger's design, which sees the rotor pack rotated 180 degrees to direct the compressed intake charge up, rather than down through an air-to-water intercooler and straight into the engine.

That strategy sees the compressed intake charge cooled three times: by the regular air-to-water intercooler, through convective heat transfer via an opening in the hood, and through a set of auxiliary intercoolers positioned just before the combustion chambers.

It's a clever bit of engineering, and it makes Callaway Cars a definite contender for "best gen-six Camaro tuning package."