This 425-HP Hemi Super Bee Was Secretly Making 715 Horsepower — And It Still Almost Lost to a Corvette L88

A 425-horsepower Hemi Super Bee went wheel to wheel with a Corvette packing a secretly underrated L88 427, and somehow came out ahead at the stripe. The Corvette turned the higher trap speed. The Dodge turned the better reaction time. This is how a factory-legal Mopar built to the edge of its rulebook nearly took down one of GM’s rarest big-blocks.

On paper, this race should not have been close. A 1968 Dodge Super Bee wearing Chrysler’s factory rating of 425 horsepower lined up against a 1969 Corvette carrying the legendary L88 427, a race-bred big-block Chevrolet officially pegged at just 430 horsepower. Both numbers were polite fictions, the kind Detroit told in the late 1960s to keep insurance companies and sanctioning bodies calm while the real output hid under the hood. What actually happened when these two icons met at the Christmas tree, captured by the Cars and Zebras channel in a Pure Stock Muscle Car Drag Race, is a study in just how close a straight-line fight between America’s two most mythologized engines can get. The Corvette carried a genuine speed advantage through the traps. The Dodge carried something else entirely.

The video pits the Super Bee against the Corvette in the Pure Stock Muscle Car Drag Race series, an event built around one strict premise: no headers, no roller cams, no aftermarket radiators, and no shortcuts. Cars competing in Pure Stock racing must run factory-correct casting numbers on their intake, heads, and exhaust manifolds, factory-style mufflers, and reproduction or period-correct tires, all in the name of settling a question generations of enthusiasts have argued about: which of Detroit’s factory-built muscle cars was actually fastest, run exactly as it left the assembly line.

That framing matters because the two combatants represent opposite ends of the muscle car playbook. The Super Bee’s 426 Hemi was Chrysler’s dedicated race engine, detuned just enough to be street legal and built around raw cubic-inch torque and a reputation for eating anything that pulled up beside it. The Corvette’s L88 427 took the opposite route: an aluminum-head, high-compression big-block that Chevrolet deliberately underrated on paper and buried behind ordering restrictions, hoping to reach only buyers serious enough to actually race the car. Watching them run side by side, as this video does, is as close as most fans will ever get to settling the argument in real time, since real unstaged matchups between the two are rare to find on camera at all.

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The Hemi and the L88: Two Engines Built to Beat Each Other

The 426 Hemi arrived in Dodge and Plymouth showrooms in 1966 as the street version of Chrysler’s dominant NASCAR and NHRA race engine, carrying a factory rating of 425 horsepower at 5,000 rpm and 490 lb-ft of torque at 4,000 rpm, figures contemporary road testers already considered conservative. Chrysler built it with a forged crankshaft, forged rods, and the massive hemispherical combustion chambers that gave the engine its name, allowing larger valves and better breathing than almost anything else on the market at the time. Dodge built only 125 Super Bees with the 426 Hemi in 1968, a scarcity driven largely by an option price that added nearly $1,000 to the car’s sticker.

The L88 427 arrived in Corvettes a year later, in 1967, as one of the most deliberately obscured options General Motors ever offered. Officially rated at 430 horsepower at 5,200 rpm, the L88 paired an aluminum cylinder head with a mechanical camshaft, a single 850-cfm Holley carburetor, and compression high enough that Chevrolet required buyers to run race fuel, a restriction the factory used partly to scare off casual shoppers. Historians and engine builders have long argued the L88’s real output ran well past its factory number, with dyno estimates commonly landing between 500 and 560 horsepower. Chevrolet built just 116 L88 Corvettes for 1969, the engine’s final year on the option sheet, out of nearly 38,762 Corvettes made that model year.

Inside the Pure Stock Rules That Keep the Fight Honest

What separates this matchup from an ordinary grudge race is the rulebook behind it. The Pure Stock Muscle Car Drag Race series only accepts American and Canadian-built muscle cars from 1955 to 1979, and disqualifies anything running quicker than an 11.50-second quarter mile, a ceiling meant to keep the field close to factory tune. Entrants must retain period-correct camshaft specs, stock ignition components, and cast-iron exhaust manifolds routed exactly as they left the factory, with headers banned outright, even on cars that originally shipped with a set in the trunk.

In a comment on the video, Scott Tiemann of Supercar Specialties, who built the Super Bee for owner Rick Mahoney, described just how far a legally prepared Pure Stock Hemi can be pushed within those rules: a .030-inch overbore, a .015-inch stroke, 11.5:1 compression, and .480 inches of valve lift, all within the class’s tolerances. Tiemann says the combination put the car at 715 horsepower on the dyno with exhaust manifolds installed, made it the quickest Pure Stock car in its class at a 10.87-second quarter mile at 129 mph, and that it carried 250 pounds of ballast for this particular race to stay within the rules. Those are the builder’s own figures, offered in the comments rather than independently verified, but they go a long way toward explaining exactly why this Hemi could hang with a car giving up nothing in trap speed.

A Race Closer Than the Horsepower Numbers Suggest

On the actual pass, the Corvette carries a real top-end advantage, crossing the line roughly 15 mph faster in trap speed than the Super Bee, a gap several commenters flagged as proof of just how much power that L88 427 is truly making once it gets rolling. But the Hemi’s advantage shows up where it matters most in a heads-up drag race: at the starting line. Tiemann, driving the Dodge, described using minimal wheel spin off the line and managing his margin at the stripe just enough to hold off the Corvette’s charge, a launch and reaction-time edge that let the “underpowered” Mopar close out a race it had no business winning against a car giving up nothing in trap speed.

Both cars remain among the most valuable muscle-era survivors on the collector market today. A 1969 L88 convertible sold for $850,000 on Bring a Trailer in 2026, and unrestored, low-mileage examples have been shopped at auction with expectations north of $1 million, driven largely by the model’s scarcity of just 116 built. Hemi Super Bees have followed a similar, if less extreme, trajectory: pristine, numbers-matching examples are now expected to fetch six figures at major auctions. That rising scarcity is part of what makes an unstaged, real-world race between the two this well-matched, and this well-documented, so rare to come across.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.