When Elon Musk burst onto the scene in his little Tesla Roadster, it seemed a matter of time before electricity rendered gas-powered sports cars obsolete.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Automakers have struggled to bring purely electric two-seaters to market. The ones that managed to emerge have been flatly rejected by consumers. Porsche has walked back plans for an all-electric lineup of Boxster and Cayman models, seemingly spooked by technical hurdles and tepid response from its fanatical customers. Lamborghini last week scrapped plans for its first all-electric model, with the CEO saying the brand’s customers have almost “zero interest” in a car without a gas engine.
And yet, the Corvette ZR1X hybrid — surreal, spectacular, and a screaming bargain versus rivals — demonstrates how electrification is revolutionizing the highest ranks of performance, just not in the way people expected. That includes Formula 1 racing, where 50 percent of power this season comes from hybrid electricity. Among supercars and hypercars especially, if you don’t have a hybrid boost, you can no longer compete.
My test of the ZR1X, at Sonoma Raceway and on roads in Napa Valley, underscores the inevitability of that electric helping hand. Read these numbers, and feel free to weep: 1,250 hybrid horsepower, up from 1,064 in the gasoline-only ZR1. A 0–60mph moonshot in 1.67 seconds, nose-to-nose with a $2.5 million Rimac Nevera R EV, and quicker than any Tesla or Lucid.
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A storming lap of Germany’s benchmark Nürburgring circuit took 6 minutes, 49 seconds and change. That set a new American production-car record, beat the Rimac by 16 seconds, and just nipped Porsche’s track-specialist 911 GT3 RS. It also handily beat the Yangwang U9 extreme, the 3,000-horsepower, roughly $235,000 Chinese EV that’s more a prototype than a legitimate “production car,” since no more than 30 will ever be built. That Yangwang clocked an impressive 6 minute, 59-second lap, the first EV in history to run below seven minutes at the ’ring.
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