The New Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 Sounds Very Turbocharged

We’re getting ever closer to laying eyes on the C8 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, and Chevy is keeping us on the edge of our seats with yet another teaser. The video gives us some very brief glimpses of the new car, and doesn’t give away too much visually that we don’t already know – it still has a truly massive rear wing, and we can also very briefly see a quartet of sizeable exhaust pipes that look to be shared with the Z06.

It does, however, give us our first proper listen to the ZR1’s still unconfirmed engine under hard acceleration, and what’s that faint whistling sound in the background? Could it be a pair of turbochargers?

The Z06, the current highest-performance version of the C8, uses an all-new, flat-plane crank naturally aspirated 5.5-litre V8. With 670bhp, it’s already the most powerful free-breathing V8 ever fitted to a road car.

The engine note in the ZR1 teaser definitely has the sort of raw edge of a flat-plane crank V8, suggesting it uses a development of that same engine, and given that it’ll almost certainly pack even more power than the Z06, some form of forced induction seems like a no-brainer.

Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 C8 teaser

While there have been supercharged Corvettes before, not least the last two ZR1s, there’s never been one with factory turbos before, but it seems increasingly likely that that’s about to change. The idea that the ZR1 will use a blown version of the Z06’s motor certainly squares with the fact that last year, a mysterious twin-turbo 5.5-litre V8 with the codename ‘LT7’ popped up in a General Motors parts catalogue.

We still don’t have a full reveal date, but Chevy says it’s coming this summer. It’s now June, so we’re surely just weeks, perhaps days, from seeing its answer to the fastest, most hardcore members of the supercar club.