Meet the Corvette ZR1X: America’s 1,250-horsepower hybrid hypercar

Enough is never enough. Chevrolet has only just released the Corvette ZR1, which at 1,064 horsepower is the fastest, quickest and most outrageous production car ever to wear a bowtie on the hood.

It can keep the neckwear, but its performance crown has already found a new home. Meet the new ZR1X, an even higher-performance Corvette that will take America’s sports car to new heights. It has 1,250HP, all-wheel drive and accelerates to 60MPH in less than two seconds.

Oh, and yes, it’s a hybrid. I got an early look at the thing at a private debut recently, and here’s everything you need to know about America’s new hypercar.

E-Ray Maximus

The ZR1X joins an increasingly busy lineup of Corvette models that ensures buyers with budgets ranging from generous to extreme all have something to covet. The Stingray is still the base model, with a starting price of just over $70,000 and 490HP.

From a financial standpoint, next up is the Corvette E-Ray, the hybrid model introduced in 2023. It adds a 160HP electric motor to the proceedings, resulting in a total output of 655HP. The E-Ray is positioned as something of a grand tourer: really fast but with a somewhat relaxed attitude. That also starts at a little over $100,000.

From there, you can step up to the higher-performance, more track-focused Z06 model, which, unsurprisingly, is also higher priced. It has a much racier 5.5-liter V8 engine making 670HP and a spendier starting price of just over $110,000.

Those were recently joined by the new ZR1, which adds turbochargers plus numerous engine updates to deliver that whopping 1,064HP and a wild 233MPH top speed. Its asking price is also wild, starting at around $175,000. That already makes it the most expensive Corvette ever, but things are about to get more extreme.

The ZR1X is something of a melding of the ZR1 and the hybrid E-Ray. It borrows the electrical layout from the E-Ray and mounts it inside a ZR1, including that car’s turbocharged V8 and wild aerodynamic appendages. Layer on some tasty upgrades to both the electric drive system and other aspects of the car, and you have the new 1,250HP ZR1X.

Combining the ZR1 and E-Ray gets you a good way towards creating the ZR1X, but there is a lot more to it than that. The ZR1X uses a battery pack with a revised internal construction, resulting in a capacity increase of 26 percent. But keep in mind this isn’t a plug-in hybrid. You’re still talking about something with a battery capacity of less than three kWh. You won’t be driving in your ZR1X emissions-free.

The hybrid system is there for more performance, and to that end, the car has a few new drive modes to help optimize the delivery of energy from that new pack. First is Endurance Mode, where the ZR1X will provide full power to the front motor but not tax the battery so much that you have to worry about running out of charge mid-session.

Then there’s Qualifying Mode. Select this, and the ZR1X will dump all the energy it can through the front motor to give you the outright maximum single-lap pace. There’s also a “Push to Pass” button, providing a brief period of maximum acceleration for those times when you absolutely need to get past that lollygagger ahead who’s costing you precious seconds on your commute.

All that extra speed necessitated some upgrades in the stopping department. The ZR1X wears a set of massive carbon brakes from Alcon, the company that makes these parts for some of Chevrolet’s racing machines. The 16.5-inch discs at the front equate to 1.9G of braking force. Installing a race harness might be a good idea so that you don’t go flying out of the chair the first time you hit that left pedal.

Despite the extra power at the front axle from that electric motor, the ZR1X rolls on the same size tires as the less-powerful, rear-driven ZR1. “We were tempted to go wider,” the Corvette’s chief engineer Josh Holder told me. “That’s a delicate balance between unsprung mass and driving dynamics off-power, and we believe we’ve made the right choice.”

Holder said it came down to working with Michelin on tire development plus some tweaks to the car’s traction management software. “That’s one of the things that we had to tune very carefully, given the power output now in ZR1X, just to make sure that we’re not spinning up the front axle when you’re at a high lateral load,” he said.

Familiar dynamics

Keith Badgley, development engineer on the ZR1X, said that, despite the extra power and everything else, the ZR1X will still have the same accessible performance feel that defines the Corvette line: “We designed this to be as composed as the Stingray with but with two and a half times the power. We wanted ultimate traction, maximum acceleration.”

“I would say it doesn’t drive differently, in terms of being able to claw out over the corner, being able to balance the car with power delivery from the front axle,” Holder said. “You can do things in the E-Ray and the ZR1X that, if you did in the rear-drive car, would not work out so well for you… But that balance and dynamics, they behave similarly to the ZR1X has more capability.”

But what it probably won’t offer is the same level of attainability that the Corvette has historically been known for. Chevrolet isn’t saying how much the ZR1X will cost when it goes on sale later this year. But it surely won’t be cheap.

Again, the ZR1 starts at about $175,000. The E-Ray carries a price that’s roughly $30,000 over the base Stingray. If we apply the same premium here, we’re in the ballpark of $200,000. Add on the other upgrades, like the fancy Alcon brakes and better battery pack, and it’s easy to assume that this thing will be priced within reach of some European exotics.

Will it be worth it? We’ll have to wait and see until we get a go behind the wheel, but Chevrolet has already been testing the thing extensively around the Nurburgring, covering over 600 miles at the greatest vehicular performance playground on the planet. Hopefully, it does just as well on the streets and circuits closer to home.

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