Watch the New Chevy Camaro ZL1 Race the Dodge Challenger Hellcat

Fifty-seven horsepower separated the sixth-generation Camaro ZL1 from the Challenger SRT Hellcat, and the Dodge held the bigger number. Hennessey Performance lined them up anyway, and the horsepower column turned out to be the least interesting part of the comparison — because weight, gearing, tire width, and what happens in the first sixty feet decide a drag race long before either car reaches top gear. Read on to find out why 650 horsepower and 707 horsepower end up much closer than the spec sheets suggest.

On paper this one should have been settled before the tires stopped spinning. Fifty-seven horsepower separated the two cars, and it was the Dodge holding the bigger number — 707 of them, out of a supercharged HEMI that had spent three years terrorizing spec sheets and comment sections in equal measure. Chevrolet’s answer arrived with 650 and considerably less internet folklore attached to it. Hennessey Performance had already run the new ZL1 against a Corvette Z06, so lining it up beside a Hellcat was the obvious next move. What the horsepower column will not tell you is how much of a drag race gets decided before second gear.

The Numbers Each Car Brought to the Line

The sixth-generation Camaro ZL1 arrived with the supercharged 6.2-liter LT4 V8 rated at 650 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque, wrapped in a chassis that weighs a little under 3,900 pounds. The Challenger SRT Hellcat countered with a supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI at 707 horsepower and the same 650 lb-ft, in a car that tips the scales closer to 4,450 pounds. Both use forced induction on an identical displacement, both send drive to the rear wheels only, and both were sold to buyers who fully intended to take them to a drag strip.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Power-to-Weight Closes the Gap Immediately

Run the division and the picture changes immediately. The ZL1 carries roughly six pounds for every horsepower it makes; the Hellcat carries closer to six and a third. That is a small margin, but it runs in the Camaro’s favor despite the fifty-seven-horsepower deficit, and it is the reason these two cars finish far closer together than the headline figures imply. Weight also punishes the Dodge everywhere else — in braking, in direction changes, in tire wear — but on a straight quarter mile the only thing that matters is that the Camaro has less of it to move.

Two Superchargers, Two Philosophies

The two blowers take genuinely different approaches. Chevrolet’s LT4 uses a comparatively small 1.7-liter Eaton twin-vortices supercharger spinning fast at modest boost, packaged low enough to keep the hood line down and the center of gravity where the chassis engineers wanted it. Dodge went the other direction with a 2.4-liter IHI twin-screw unit running higher boost, an approach that produces the Hellcat’s signature whine and its enormous mid-range shove but adds mass high in the engine bay. Neither is wrong. They are answers to different questions about what the car is supposed to be.

Transmissions and the First Sixty Feet

The transmission matters at least as much. The Hellcat’s eight-speed automatic, paired with launch control and a torque converter, is very difficult for a driver to beat off the line and shifts faster than any human operating a clutch. The ZL1 was offered with a six-speed manual or a ten-speed automatic, and the difference between those two configurations in a standing-start race is larger than the difference between the two cars. A manual ZL1 driven well can hang with anything; a manual ZL1 driven badly loses to the Dodge before the first shift is complete.

Tires Decide More Than the Dyno Does

Rubber decides more of this than either engine does. The ZL1 rides on wide, aggressively compounded summer tires with a meaningfully broader rear contact patch than the Hellcat’s, and it has less mass trying to overwhelm it. The Hellcat’s problem in stock trim is well documented: on street tires and an unprepared surface it will simply light the rears up and squander its horsepower advantage in smoke. Swap on drag radials and prep the surface and the Dodge transforms, which is why published times for the car vary so widely depending on who ran it and where.

Where the Hellcat Gets Its Advantage Back

Once both cars are moving and hooked up, the horsepower advantage starts to assert itself. Aerodynamic drag rises with the square of speed, so the deeper into a run you go, the more raw power matters and the less anything else does. That is the part of the track where the Hellcat is genuinely the stronger car, and it is why comparisons between the two often show the Camaro quicker to sixty miles an hour while the Dodge closes and sometimes passes near the far end. Which one wins depends heavily on where you decide to draw the finish line.

Why a Tuner Cared About This Matchup

Hennessey’s interest in the pairing was never purely journalistic. The shop’s business is built on taking factory performance cars well past where the manufacturer left them, and both of these platforms became staples of its catalog — supercharger upgrades, pulley and injector packages, and full builds pushing either car past a thousand horsepower. Running them against each other in stock form establishes the baseline that every subsequent upgrade gets measured against, and it puts both cars in front of exactly the audience most likely to buy one. It is marketing, but it is marketing that requires actually going to a track and running the cars, which is more than can be said for most of it.

2017 Was the Peak of Factory Muscle

It is worth remembering how unusual 2017 actually was. A buyer walking into a dealership could order 650 horsepower from Chevrolet or 707 from Dodge, with a factory warranty, on a payment plan, and the following year Dodge would sell them a Demon making 808 on pump gas. Nothing in the muscle car era of the 1960s came remotely close to those figures, and nothing in that era offered them alongside airbags, stability control, and air conditioning that works. The rivalry between these two cars was the visible surface of an arms race that had escalated further than anyone expected it to.

What Actually Decides a Race Like This

In practice, races like the one Hennessey filmed are decided by variables that never appear on a spec sheet. Air temperature and density change how much power each engine makes on the day. Surface preparation changes what the tires can hold. Reaction time at the tree, launch technique, tire pressure, and how much fuel is in each car all move the result by more than the fifty-seven-horsepower gap does. That is exactly why these videos keep getting made: the outcome is not actually predictable from the numbers, which is the only reason anyone bothers to run them.

The Rivalry Outlived Both Cars

Both of these cars have since gone out of production — the Challenger ended its run at the end of 2023, and the sixth-generation Camaro followed shortly after, closing a chapter that had been open since 1967, interrupted only once by a seven-year hiatus between 2002 and 2010. What survives is the argument, which has now moved to used listings, forums, and exactly the sort of video that started this one. Two supercharged 6.2-liter V8s, one straight line, and a fifty-seven-horsepower difference that never mattered nearly as much as everyone assumed it would. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter