2017 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 650 HP: The Best Camaro so far!

Chevrolet had a choice with the 2017 Camaro ZL1: engineer a new flagship engine or borrow the supercharged LT4 from the Corvette Z06. It borrowed, and the result made 650 horsepower and 650 lb-ft in a car roughly 200 pounds lighter than the ZL1 it replaced. The straight-line numbers were only half the story, because the chassis work is what made it competitive with cars costing three times as much. Read on for what Chevrolet actually changed.

There is a decision every performance division eventually has to make, and it usually gets settled by budget rather than engineering. Build a bespoke engine for the flagship, or take the one already sitting in the corporate parts bin that happens to be the meanest thing the company makes. Chevrolet chose the second option for the 2017 Camaro ZL1, and the result was a car that outran things costing three times as much while wearing a badge you could also find on a rental-fleet coupe. The horsepower number was not even the interesting part. The interesting part was what the chassis engineers did with it once it arrived.

The LT4 Came Straight From the Corvette Z06

The 2017 ZL1’s engine was the LT4, a supercharged 6.2-liter pushrod V8 rated at 650 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque, and it marked the first time that engine had appeared in a Camaro. It debuted in the 2015 Corvette Z06, where it used an Eaton R1740 twin-vortices supercharger displacing 1.7 liters and running roughly 9.4 psi of boost, along with titanium intake valves, a forged aluminum piston set, and a rotocast aluminum cylinder head casting. Dropping it into the Camaro required a new hood with a functional extractor vent and eleven separate heat exchangers to manage the thermal load, but the engine itself carried over essentially intact.

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A Lighter Camaro Made the Numbers Work

The reason it worked so well is that the sixth-generation Camaro had gone on a diet first. Moving to GM’s Alpha platform, shared with the Cadillac ATS and CTS, took roughly 200 pounds out of the car compared to the fifth-generation ZL1 while also increasing structural rigidity. That combination matters more than it sounds. A stiffer, lighter body means the suspension tuning actually does what the engineers intended instead of fighting chassis flex, and it means the same power figure produces a better power-to-weight ratio. The 2017 car was quicker than its predecessor everywhere, and only part of that came from the extra 70 horsepower.

Ten Speeds, or Three Pedals

Transmission choice was unusually good. Buyers could take a six-speed Tremec manual with active rev matching, which blips the throttle on downshifts and can be switched off entirely, or a ten-speed automatic that was new to the ZL1 and had been co-developed with Ford. Ten forward ratios in a muscle car sounded absurd at the time and turned out to be the faster option by a clear margin, keeping the LT4 inside its torque peak through the entire quarter mile. The automatic also shifted quickly enough that the manual became a preference rather than a performance decision, which is a rare and welcome situation.

Magnetic Ride and Why It Mattered Here

Magnetic Ride Control was standard, using dampers filled with a magnetorheological fluid whose viscosity changes in milliseconds under an electrical current. In practical terms it let a car with a 650-horsepower engine and enormous tires remain genuinely usable on a broken public road, then firm up into something track-capable at the touch of a drive mode. It worked alongside an electronic limited-slip differential and Performance Traction Management, the five-stage system carried over from the Corvette that meters engine torque and brake intervention rather than simply cutting power when the rear axle steps out.

The Straight-Line Numbers

The numbers held up against anything on sale. Zero to 60 mph took about 3.5 seconds with the automatic, the quarter mile came in around 11.4 seconds at roughly 127 mph, and Chevrolet quoted a top speed of 198 mph. Those figures put a Camaro in the same conversation as European supercars from only a few years earlier, at a fraction of the price, and they were achieved on Goodyear Eagle F1 Supercar 3 tires developed specifically for the car. The following year’s ZL1 1LE package would go further still, lapping the Nürburgring in 7:16.04.

Stopping a 650-Horsepower Coupe

Braking hardware was scaled to match, which is not always the case in this segment. The ZL1 used Brembo six-piston fixed calipers on 15.35-inch two-piece front rotors and four-piston units at the rear, with cooling ducts fed through the front fascia. That is genuine track equipment rather than a large-diameter rotor fitted for appearances, and it is a large part of why the car could run repeated hot laps without the pedal going long. Combined with the eleven heat exchangers, the 2017 ZL1 was engineered from the outset to survive sustained abuse rather than to post one impressive number and then heat-soak.

The Original ZL1 and Its All-Aluminum 427

The ZL1 badge carries real weight. It originated with the 1969 COPO 9560 Camaro, ordered through Chevrolet’s Central Office Production Order system to circumvent the corporate ban on engines over 400 cubic inches in intermediate cars. Those cars received the all-aluminum 427 cubic-inch ZL1 racing engine, officially rated at 430 horsepower and almost universally believed to have made well over 500. Just 69 were built, and the option nearly doubled the price of the car. Using that badge on a modern Camaro was a claim, and the 2017 car was the first one that plausibly lived up to it.

How It Compared to Hellcat and Shelby

Its rivals were formidable. The Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat made 707 horsepower but carried substantially more weight and was tuned as a straight-line and highway car. The Shelby GT350 made 526 horsepower from a naturally aspirated flat-plane-crank 5.2-liter and was the better instrument on a tight circuit but gave away enormous ground on a drag strip. The ZL1 sat between them and was competitive in both disciplines, which is why so many contemporary comparison tests landed on it. It was not the most powerful car in the class and it was frequently the quickest around a lap.

Where the 2017 ZL1 Sits Today

Nearly a decade on, the sixth-generation ZL1 has aged into one of the better-value performance cars of its era. Depreciation was real but has flattened, six-speed manual cars carry a premium over automatics despite being marginally slower, and the 1LE variants have started to firm up as collectors recognize how few were built. The Camaro’s discontinuation after the 2024 model year gave the whole generation a defined endpoint, which historically is what starts the clock on collectibility. The 2017 ZL1 was the car that made the sixth generation credible, and that tends to be remembered.

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