OK, this prospect is insane. Revamping a street-ripping Camaro is at first glance sacrilegious, but That's Hennessey's expertise.
When the nut and bolt geniuses at Texas-based Hennessey Performance Engineering offer viewers a chance to check out how they get a Camaro to floor it with over a thousand horsepower, that unwavering loyalty just might pause for a moment to find out more. With thoughts of getting more horses under the hood, chances are that car owners want to get the inside scoop on how to soup up even the most uppity of sportscars. Since 1991, that task has become second nature to the company, founded in 1991 by former racer John Hennessey.
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In this case, the Hennesey squad tried their hands at a stock 2018 metallic hyper-blue Camaro ZL1, with hopes of converting it into a road monster they call the Exorcist, which is also a package offered to customers wanting to upgrade their Camaros. It's first propped up on the garage's dyno so mechanics can give the car a baseline test to confirm it's in good enough shape for this radical modification. Staff then remove the supercharger, front drive accessories, cylinder heads, and the camshaft.
The Camaro is then outfitted with a shiny set of porter and polished headers that modify the intake and exhaust from the cylinders for that really cool fast car sound and a little bit of extra horsepower. A custom-built camshaft is also inserted into the engine, capped with a new 2.9-liter supercharger, which upgrades the air displacement to the engine and adds more spin, which in turn generates even more power. Other features are also added, especially an upgraded fuel system.
Once the mechanics are done, the tasks move on to calibrating and tweaking the Camaro, now incarnated as the Exorcist. It's a series of painstaking tasks involving adjustments of spark advance, timing curves, air-fuel ratio, and ignition timing.
Finally comes the moment of truth when one lucky staffer gets behind the wheel to test this revamped baby on the track. Gearing up, there's no kitty-purring engine in that beast. It's a full-blown roar as the Exorcist jumps to nearly 140 miles an hour with RPMs spinning past 8,000 RPMs on the backstretch.
Mission accomplished, creating an incentive for Camaro fans to get their prize rides Exorcised.