800-hp ‘Yenko’ 2017 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport revealed

Yenko’s name has not meant much on a new car in decades, but a modern stroker build on the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport just brought it roaring back. With a supercharged 6.8-liter making roughly 800 horsepower, wrapped in Grand Sport hardware and genuine Yenko styling cues, only fifty of these were ever built. Read on to find out what’s actually under the skin.

Yenko has not built a genuinely new muscle car from a factory dealership partnership in decades, so when the name resurfaced on a modern Corvette, it meant business rather than nostalgia marketing. This is not a badge-and-stripe package, it is a full stroker build that takes Chevy’s own Grand Sport and pushes it well past what GM engineers were willing to certify from the factory. Only fifty examples exist, each one built to a formula that would have made the original Yenko Camaros of the muscle car era genuinely proud. What does it take to turn an already-serious Corvette into an 800-horsepower legend with a warranty?

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A Real Stroker Build, Not Just a Sticker Kit

The Yenko treatment starts under the hood, where a supercharger and a genuine stroker kit take the Grand Sport’s 6.2-liter LT1 out to 6.8 liters of displacement, with a stronger crankshaft, H-beam connecting rods, and upgraded pistons swapped in to handle the added stress reliably. Fuel system and injectors come straight from the Z06 parts bin, built to feed an engine that now makes roughly 800 horsepower and 750 lb-ft of torque, numbers that put it solidly in supercar territory while still wearing a Bowtie on the nose.

Grand Sport Bones, Yenko Attitude

Because the package builds on the Corvette Grand Sport rather than a base car, buyers already get wider fenders, magnetorheological adaptive suspension, Brembo brakes, a limited-slip differential, and a dry-sump oiling system before Yenko even touches it. On top of that foundation, customers can spec a 7-speed manual or 8-speed automatic, choose coupe or convertible, and finish it off with Yenko racing stripes, a cast-aluminum quad-tip exhaust, and a new rear diffuser, genuine visual cues tying it back to the original SYC Camaros and Novas of the 1960s.

What It Costs to Own One of Fifty

At roughly 46,000 dollars on top of the Grand Sport’s 66,445-dollar starting price, and backed by a 3-year/36,000-mile warranty, this is about as close as a modern buyer gets to ordering a factory-fresh Yenko without a time machine. Just fifty were built, which means finding one for sale is already its own kind of hunt, and resale values for the first examples to change hands have reportedly held up well above the original build price. That warranty detail matters more than it might seem — most aftermarket stroker builds void a manufacturer’s coverage entirely, while Yenko’s program was structured through dealer channels specifically to keep it intact.

The Yenko Name and Its 1960s Roots

Back in the 1960s, the muscle cars from Yenko Chevrolet of Canonsburg, Pennsylvania were highly regarded for their performance modifications, most famously the Yenko Super Camaro package that squeezed 427-cubic-inch big-blocks into cars GM never officially rated that high. Those original SYC cars are among the most collectible muscle cars of that entire era today, which is exactly the reputation this modern Corvette package was built to invoke rather than simply borrow for marketing purposes. Don Yenko himself worked around GM’s internal displacement limits by ordering cars through a dealer-installed conversion process, a workaround that later inspired an entire generation of tuners looking to push factory hardware past its official limits.

Why a Stroker Kit Beats a Simple Supercharger Swap

Bolting on a supercharger alone would have gotten a modern Yenko build most of the way to serious horsepower, but the added displacement from the stroker kit changes the engine’s entire torque character, delivering meaningful low-end grunt that a smaller, more highly boosted engine often can’t match without lag. That distinction matters on the street far more than a dyno sheet number does, since real-world drivability depends heavily on how an engine responds the instant a driver’s foot goes down.

How the Grand Sport Differs From a Base Stingray

A base Stingray shares the same fundamental LT1 architecture as the Grand Sport, but skips the wide-body fenders, the Multimatic dampers, and the aerodynamic pieces borrowed directly from the C7.R race program that make the Grand Sport handle like a road-going race car straight from the factory. Starting the Yenko build from that chassis rather than a base Stingray gives the finished product a genuinely track-capable foundation underneath all that extra horsepower.

Transmission Choices and What They Change

Offering both a 7-speed manual and an 8-speed automatic lets Yenko buyers choose between old-school engagement and outright acceleration numbers, since the automatic typically launches harder and shifts faster than even a skilled driver can manage with a clutch pedal. Enthusiasts chasing the purest connection to the original Yenko ethos tend to lean toward the manual anyway, even knowing it likely costs them a few tenths in a straight-line sprint against the automatic-equipped car.

Visual Cues That Tie Back to the Original SYC Cars

The racing stripes, quad-tip exhaust, and rear diffuser aren’t just modern styling flourishes, they’re a direct visual callback to the original Yenko package’s own understated-but-unmistakable presentation, which relied on stripes and badges rather than wild body kits to signal what was actually happening under the hood. That restraint is very much in keeping with the muscle car era’s sleeper tradition, even on a car already wearing a fairly aggressive Grand Sport body underneath.

Finding One of Fifty

With only fifty examples built, tracking one down today typically means working through specialty Corvette dealers or Yenko’s own network rather than a general classifieds search, and buyers should expect to pay a premium over the original build price given both the rarity and the ongoing strength of the modern Corvette collector market more broadly. Documentation tying a specific car back to its original Yenko build sheet matters just as much here as it does on a genuine 1960s original.

A Modern Sleeper Wearing a Legendary Badge

Fifty years after the original SYC Camaros first embarrassed unsuspecting street racers, the Yenko name is still doing exactly the same job on a completely different platform, proving that a legendary badge can mean just as much wrapped around a modern Corvette as it once did around a first-generation Camaro. The formula hasn’t really changed either — start with GM’s best factory hardware, push the engine further than the factory was willing to certify, and let the results speak for themselves at the next stoplight.

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