You Could Buy 18 Corvette ZR1Xs For The Price Of A Slower Ferrari F80

By now, we’ve read all the specs on the insane 1,250-horsepower Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X, and they’re all hypercar stuff. Zero-to-60 mph in less than two seconds, a top speed of 233 mph, a quarter-mile elapsed time in the eights, 1.9G of braking from 180 mph to 120 mph, and the fourth-quickest Nürburgring time of any production car. The only question mark left surrounded pricing, and now that GM has told everyone how much this top-dog Corvette costs, it seems like the bargain of the century.

If your local Chevrolet dealer has an allocation and you want the cheapest ZR1X available, you’ll be looking at a sticker price of $207,395, including freight for the base 1LZ coupe trim. Now, $207,395 is a lot of money, but not compared to what this thing can credibly compete with. If you want an electrified two-seater with performance metrics in this sort of ballpark, you’re looking at genuine hypercars with seven-figure price tags. A Porsche 918 Spyder is now worth more than $2 million, a Bugatti Chiron is at least a $2.8 million car, and a LaFerrari is now worth more than $3.5 million.

Even if we zoom in on cars that can run from zero-to-60 mph in less than two seconds, the ZR1X is still a solid deal. For cars in that ballpark, you have the $250,500 Lucid Air Sapphire, the $241,750 Porsche Taycan Turbo GT, and the $2 million Rimac Nevera. While those electric sedans seem like screaming deals compared to the Rimac, not only is the ZR1X tens of thousands of dollars cheaper still, it’s also more capable once you actually take it to a track to find out what it can do.

Oh, and if the silent glide of a battery electric vehicle doesn’t float your boat, here’s a stat to wrap your head around: The Ferrari F80 is slower both zero-to-60 mph and in top speed than the ZR1X, with Maranello’s new flagship clocking respective stats of 2.1 seconds and 217 mph. However, you know how many Corvette ZR1X examples you could buy for the price of a Ferrari F80? Eighteen.

Now, let’s talk Nürburgring times. Given the insane news cycle, just about everyone now knows that the Corvette ZR1X is nearly 2.8 seconds quicker around the Nordschleife than a Mustang GTD. Thanks to this pricing announcement, we now know that the ZR1X is also $120,565 less expensive than the $327,960 Mustang GTD. Yep, you could buy an entire Lotus Emira for that price delta. Now, the asterisk is that the ZR1X needs a performance package to achieve that lap time, but so does the GTD, and the package on the Ford goes for $40,000 according to a window sticker posted online. While pricing for the ZR1X’s performance package hasn’t been announced yet, the same package for the regular ZR1 will run you $10,000, so expect pricing to run along those lines, given the extensive similarities between the ZR1’s ZTK package and the ZR1X’s ZTK package.

In a similar vein, the Corvette ZR1X is also quicker around the Nürburgring than the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, a machine that starts at $253,695 including freight and requires a $34,730 Weissach package to set a time of 6:49.328. That package also comes bundled with a $4,910 interior in America, so we’re looking at a price gap big enough to slide a sweet daily driver into.

So yeah, even though the Corvette ZR1X is a $207,395 car, it’s still a sort-of democratization of speed. The sort of stuff that was once the domain of the top 0.1 percent is now available to anyone with well-specced non-GT Porsche money to blow, and it can be serviced in the same dealerships that work on Silverados and Chevrolet Express vans. Imagine if some automaker sold a car that could post up base Corvette numbers but only cost about as much as a used Suzuki Kizashi. That’s the sort of speed-to-dollars ratio we’re looking at here, and it’s astonishing to take a step back and consider that humans did that.

Top graphic image: Chevrolet

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