Customer deliveries of the 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray only just started and it hasn’t taken long for owners to start putting the mid-engine supercar to the test.
Late last week, the owner of this Torch Red C8 Corvette headed to the drag strip and pitted the car against a green 2020 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500. While these two are not direct rivals, they represent the current pinnacles of the Mustang and Corvette families and are perhaps the two most desirable American performance cars currently on the market.
In the first race, the Corvette driver wasn’t able to properly enable launch control and got blown away by the Ford. In the second race, however, the Chevy driver got a far better launch and accelerated off the line at a similar pace to the GT500. At the end of the quarter-mile, the Ford recorded a time of 10.807 seconds while the Corvette set a 11.562 time.
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A time in the mid-11s is very respectable for the Corvette but we already know it can do better. Motor Trend recently had the opportunity to performance test a C8 with the Z51 Performance Package and launched it down the quarter-mile in just 11.1 seconds at 123.2 mph (198.2 km/h).
Powered by a 6.2-liter V8 engine with 490 hp, the new Corvette Stingray is down 270 hp compared to the GT500, making its acceleration abilities all the more impressive. And remember, this is just the base Corvette, and in the coming months and years, more powerful variants will hit the market including at least one with a twin-turbo V8 and a handful of versions with hybrid powertrains.