Things did not go well when Emelia Hartford tried to tweak her mid-engined ‘Vette last summer, nearly resulting in a write-off. The car was resurrected, nicknamed ‘Phoenix’, and tuned again. It has now set an international record.
As you may have heard, the eighth-gen Corvette only offers limited tuning capabilities due to a locked ECU. Despite this, Emelia’s example slams the wheels with all of 1,200 hp (900 kW) instead of the stock 503 hp (375 kW). The secret is in a separate external ECU module used to control injection, boost pressure, sync etc.
Emelia’s original goal was to beat the record previously set by a wild twin-turbo C8 ‘Vette build by Extreme Turbo Systems. That one managed to cross the finish line in 9.95 seconds. She needed only two attempts to best that time by 0.05s, but decided to try her luck some more and attempted another couple of runs. The last one culminated in 9.41 seconds and 233 km/h (nearly 145 mph) at the speed trap. Impressive, don’t you think?