Twin Turbo C8 Corvette Takes on Twin Turbo Shelby GT500 in Epic Drag Race

Despite its power disadvantage, this twin turbo C8 Corvette rips off some impressive passes.

Though it took years to crack the ECU of the C8 Corvette, more than a few shops have been churning out twin turbocharged examples of the mid-engine sports car with rather excellent results, whether they come from the stock tune or a piggyback upgrade. As expected, the LT2 V8 makes for a great base to build upon, and of course, boost is a quick and dirty way to add prodigious amounts of power to that particular engine. That much is on clear display in this battle between a twin turbo C8 Corvette built by Cicio Performance and a twin turbo Shelby GT500 from the folks at Palm Beach Dyno, which was captured on film by the YouTube Channel Drag Racing and Car Stuff.

This particular twin turbo C8 Corvette is equipped with Cicio’s C900 package, which adds the pair of turbos, an air-to-water intercooler, an auxiliary fuel system, an upgraded exhaust, a FuelTech piggyback ECU, a performance calibration, and an upgraded Dodson clutch to the already-capable machine. The result is more than 800 horsepower, which reportedly propels the car from 0-60 in just 2.2 seconds and down the quarter-mile in the nine-second range.

In the other lane, we have a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 equipped with Palm Beach Dyno’s CX1600R package, which consists of a line honed and sleeved block for the car’s supercharged 5.2-liter Predator V8, as well as a billet crankshaft, custom TKM pistons, Boostline billet I-beam connecting rods, TKM cylinder heads and camshafts, Ferrea springs, ARP head studs and main studs, and a Hellion twin-turbo kit. PBD isn’t talking output here, but its lesser packages churn out as much as 900 horsepower, so it’s obviously a lot.

The proof of that, as they say, is in the pudding – when these two titans line up against each other, they put on a pretty darn good show. As one might imagine, the more powerful car takes home the win, however, with the Mustang running a 9.42-second pass at 156 mph, versus the Corvette’s 10.03-second pass at 144 mph. However, on a later solo pass, the C8 rips off a much better 9.78-second run, backing up Cicio’s claim. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get a rematch against the pony car on this particular outing, though we’d love to see the two go at it again to see what happens.

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