Our friends over at Lingenfelter Performance Engineering [1] can claim themselves as among the very first lucky dogs to get to dyno test a brand new Camaro ZL1. Lingenfelter recently posted this video [2] to their Facebook page [3] and YouTube [2] of two new ZL1 test mules they have at the LPE Headquarters in Decatur, Indiana. In the video we get to watch as the test mules take their baseline dyno runs before undergoing radical changes at the hands of the engineers at Lingenfelter.
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For a fair comparison, Lingenfetler ran one of the Camaros on a DynoJet [5] and the other on a Mustang Dyno. We don’t know for sure, but we are assuming that both of Lingenfelter’s ZL1’s are manual trans cars, given the fact that they don’t show the “PRND1” indicator on the center of the dash. So, how did the ZL1 perform? Was the super-Camaro a letdown in real-world testing, or does it look like GM may have underrated the ZL1’s power output just a touch? Well, the ZL1 Lingenfelter [1] ran on their DynoJet [5] pumped out a best of 518 horsepower and nearly 514 pound feet of torque. On the Mustang Dyno the ZL1 made 503 horsepower and 496 pound feet of torque while registering just under 8 PSI.
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So, if you assume a typical 15% drivetrain power-loss of a manual trans car, that means that the DynoJet is showing the ZL1 to be somewhere around 595 horsepower at the crank, and the lower Mustang reading would equal to around 578 crank horsepower. Check out the dyno graphs below, and stay tuned to LSXMag for more info on Lingenfelter’s ZL1 development over the coming weeks.
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