Dyno Trial: Hennessey HPE700 LS9-Powered Chevy Camaro
Forget Ford 's “Mod” motor. GM does modularity darn near like Legos. The pushrod V8 engines found in the company'strucks all the way upto and includingthe mighty Corvette ZR1 are fundamentally based on the same architecture. You can imagine, then, that engine swaps across chasses in the General's portfolio are a tantalizing prospect.
It is this swappability that has us warming up an LS9-powered Camaro on the Dynojet rollers at MD Automotive in Westminster, CA. It's the 2010 HPE700 LS9 Camaro. It's built by HennesseyPerformance Engineering. And it's completely badass.
Just how badass? Jump with me. But first,
Click here for a video of the HPE700 on the dyno.
See, the Camaro's stock 426-hp LS3 can be replaced with the rip-snorting LS9 from the Corvette ZR1 in a fairly straightforward manner (easy for us to say). It bolts right up to the Camaro's transmission and engine mounts and you don't have to “tune up” the firewall to get it to fit, either. GM 's sorted out the hard stuff already.
This has allowed Hennessey to focus on other things. Like making more power. A smaller blower pulley, a more capable intercooler circuit and a massaged calibration has endowed the HPE700 with more more sauce than the meek 638-hp rating given to the LS9 in the ZR1. The HPE700moniker, we were told,is a nod to its power output as measured at the flywheel. It's a claim we just had to test.
The terrible 91 octane premium fuel found in California has humbled tuners for years, leaving them to resort to all kinds of nefarious techniques to plump their cars' outputs, like race gas. It is this sad reality that has us suspicious of any tuner car whose tank we haven't filled ourselves.
So that's exactly what we did. We drove to the nearest Chevron and filled the HPE700'snearly-dry tank with 15 gallons of 91 octane before heading to the dyno just to be certain that everything was on the up and up.
Cracking open the throttle in angeron the rollers for the first time resulted ina unholy earthshaking wall of noise, like colliding echoes of a thousand howitzer reports. This despite the stock Camaro catback on the car.
The first pull was curiously lackadaisacal up to 4500rpm, but things really woke up on the second pull.And that includes the dead, which weren't simplywoken by the sound; they were reanimated to a Texas hoedown and then blasted to pieces. Oh, it's loud.
It's also obscenely, asininelypowerful. Doing the pulls in fourth gear, the tach needle smears across the entire face of the gauge in a few deafening seconds to the tune of 691 hp and 661 lb-ft at the wheels.
Apply whatever magical driveline loss you want. It's a monster. This thing is making well over 700 hp to the flywheel. Closer to 800. Or more. Torque stays above 600 lb-ft from 2900 rpm clear out to 6000 rpm. A couple more runs backed this result up, each with a bit more heatsoak creeping in as the revs climbed past peak power.
We'll have comprehensive driving impressions on the HPE700 soon. In the meantime, act quickly — Hennessey is only building 24 examples of the HPE700 and all but five have already been spoken for.
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