Four vehicles lined up last week at Willow Springs Raceway in California for a straight-line test on real pavement. Jason Cammisa and his team at Hagerty devised a clever strategy to equalize the playing field: starts were staggered so that all cars had a fair shot at the quarter-mile mark, regardless of how much juice they were packing or how much weight they were hauling.
A Volkswagen Golf R started 300 feet behind the front duo, while a BMW M2 CS had a head start due to its position 300 feet ahead of the pack. Then there were the two headliners: the Corvette ZR1X and the Lucid Air Sapphire, which took off side by side as soon as the Golf R reached 67 mph.
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The numbers tell the story better than anything else could. The Corvette ZR1X, packing 1,250 horsepower from a twin turbo V8 and a front electric motor, stormed through the quarter mile in 9.1 seconds at 154 mph. The Lucid Air Sapphire, drawing 1,234 horsepower from three electric motors, matched that time exactly while edging ahead to 157 mph through the traps. Both cars hit 60 mph from a standstill in a flat 2.0 seconds, and when they crossed the finish line the timing sensors simply could not separate them. As close to a dead heat as it gets.
Early on, the Corvette ZR1X pulled ahead due to the instant torque from its hybrid setup, as that extra front motor really came in handy on ordinary asphalt, no special prep required, but after a while, the extra drag from the big wing on the ZTK package began to bite, allowing the Lucid Air Sapphire to sneak ahead in the final speed stakes. They did, however, cross the finish line together.
Despite its head start, the BMW M2 CS, which has 523 horsepower, completed the quarter mile in 11.5 seconds. Meanwhile, the Volkswagen Golf R, which had 328 horsepower, took a full 12.5 seconds to complete the run despite having a bit of a head start when the others launched, demonstrating how far ahead the top two were of even the faster production cars that most drivers would consider fairly fast.
Chevrolet had previously achieved an even faster time on a sticky drag strip, 8.675 seconds at 159 mph and a 1.68-second 0-60, but Hagerty wanted to run the cars on regular, untreated asphalt to provide a more realistic picture of how they would perform in the real world. Even so, the Corvette ZR1X managed a 9.1-second time, ranking among the fastest times ever recorded at the track. No other American production automobile has come close in identical conditions.
The data recorders detected some pretty extreme peak acceleration forces near 1.75 g for the Corvette ZR1X in the early going, and that all-wheel-drive layout with the electric assist really pays off, as it pretty much eliminates any wheelspin that you’d expect when driving a powerful rear-wheel drive car. Drivers stated it felt like a smooth shove rather than a frenzied fight for grip, and the Lucid Air Sapphire delivered similar force while still pulling harder into the higher ratios.
