Evan Smith is an amazing drag
Evan Smith is an amazing drag racer. But I give a lot of credit to the Ford engineers to have a newbie driver pull a 10.66 1/4 mile at nearly 133MPH with a factory-stock GT500. Often times having tons of power and stock tires results in no traction, and the tires simply going up in smoke, with a resulting slow 1/4 mile time. Usually cars with this much power and RWD absolutely NEED drag radials or slicks to get the needed traction for decent 1/4 mile times. But not with the new GT500! And with drag radials these 1/4 mile times will undoubtedly drop even further. Plus unlike the dedicated drag racing Demon, the GT500 promises to perform in the corners as well. So it may actually rival the lighter-but-similarly powered C7 Corvette ZR1, and the less powerful, but great handling Camaro ZL1 with the 1LE track package. It is pretty certain that the heavier Challenger Hellcat Redeye will be slower in the corners, even with the widebody package. And the other American car that matches these superpowered Ponycars in the 1/4 mile running 10:60s and 10:50s is the Tesla Model S Performance. The fact that there are so many new American performance cars that cost under $100K that can accelerate like an exotic European supercars is an amazing achievement. And equally exciting is the new $60K Corvette that runs to 60MPH in 3 seconds and an 11.1 sec 1/4 mile, out of the box. And that's the base model, with more powerful versions due soon. But for this story, kudos to Ford for their amazing, new GT500!