Chevrolet’s Quiet Stunner From The New York Auto Show
On the run up to the 2016 New York Auto Show, Chevrolet was too excited to keep the lid on its newest and most hardcore of Camaros, the ZL1. The reveal was, of course, very welcome and we thought all was tranquil again in Chevy world.
But the American marque did hold back a little, and as the show went underway, pulled the wraps off a rather fetching topless version of the ZL1 coupe. We like.
Now, those looking at a car like the Camaro ZL1 would probably be someone who isn’t all too concerned with posing around town or cruising with the top down, and the common wisdom is that getting rid of a car’s roof has detrimental effects on a car’s handling and, consequently the amount of performance you can then extract from it.
But Chevrolet says that the roofless Camaro ZL1 will offer a very comparable experience to the coupe, with the car engineered to lose only a negligible amount of rigidity with the roof gone. They did not, however, specify how much weight the car had gained in the transition.
As such, they say that when the time came to offer a convertible high-performance version, there was much less work to be done to make sure it could keep pace with its roofed sibling.
On the outisde, the ZL1 convertible looks identical to the coupe, with literally nothing aside from the lack of a hard top to differentiate the two.
Aside from the wide open skies as an interior light, the convertible Camaro ZL1 packs nearly identical hardware to the coupe, with the 477kW/868Nm 6.2-litre supercharged LT4 V8 engine making a return here as well. Power is sent to the rear wheels through GM’s new 10-speed automatic, making it one of the first cars to use the transmission.
Also standard on the ZL1 convertible, as it is on the coupe, is Chevrolet’s Magnetic Ride suspension, an electronic limited-slip differential, and a set of large Brembo brakes to make sure the car stops as well as it goes.
