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The 1,064-HP 2026 Chevy Corvette ZR1: 335 Miles, 10 Hours, and the Battle of Los Angeles
The much-hyped Corvette ZR1 easily hits 60 MPH in 2.5 seconds, but how long does it take to get it around L.A.?
Christian SeabaughWriterRyan LugoIllustration ByBrandon LimPhotographerFeb 13, 2026
For a spell in my teens, I cared deeply about unofficial records for unsanctioned “races.” I suspect this bug regrettably began when I caught a late-night rerun of Jackass’ Gumball 3000 Rally from London to St. Petersburg, Russia, and back in a beater Jaguar. It sent me down a rabbit hole that only grew deeper when I learned about the Cannonball Run and its successors.
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Created by automotive journalism legend Brock Yates in the 1970s as a protest against national 55-mph speed limits, the New York City–Los Angeles Cannonball “rally” seemed like an ultimate automotive challenge. Even cooler to my impressionable 2006 brain, a longstanding record had just fallen, thanks to an eccentric enthusiast in an E39 BMW M5 taking 31 hours and 4 minutes to pull it off.
Much closer to home for this Brooklynite teen, that same driver had cut his teeth “lapping” Manhattan in just 27 minutes—a seemingly incomprehensible feat. When I was much younger and dumber, my friends and I talked about besting it. By the time we might’ve financially been able to tackle such an undertaking, self-preservation instincts had long since kicked in.
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Still, I never stopped wondering about other unofficial local records. What’s the quickest someone’s gone around Washington, D.C.’s Beltway, Berlin’s Stadtring, or Moscow’s ring road? Then I began thinking more about my adopted hometown, Los Angeles.
The Challenge
This country’s car culture capital is a weird place to circumnavigate or even to define, to put it mildly. “Los Angeles” as a catch-all name consumes all the air in local and national discourse, but it’s functionally little more than the largest of 88 cities in Los Angeles County—a sprawling Connecticut-sized mass hemmed in by the Pacific Ocean on its heavily populated western and southern flanks, split by mountains and forests across its waist, and topped by high deserts up north. To locals, the “real” L.A. is as subjective as how New Yorkers define “upstate.” (The correct answer is “everything north of The Bronx.”) “L.A.” is made up of beachside bungalows, Hollywood’s strip, and traffic-choked highways. But it’s also winding canyon roads, arrow-straight desert pavement, and famous boulevards. Trying to piece together a lap of its best driving roads in one go became an enticing and enigmatic challenge. But unlike a lap of D.C. or Manhattan, lapping this state-sized county would be as much about endurance as it would speed.
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The 2026 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, then, would be perfect for the task. Building off the MotorTrend-award-winning Corvette Z06—itself designed to win endurance races in GT3.R guise—the new ZR1 represents the pinnacle of gasoline-swilling American performance. Its headline change is behind the driver: the high-revving, flat-plane-crank 5.5-liter V-8 is a beefed-up derivative of the Z06’s, fit with twin turbos that force so much air through the engine that they’re capable of generating 37 pounds of thrust out the exhaust pipes. Total output is 1,064 hp and 828 lb-ft of torque, putting its power down through steamroller-wide Michelins via an eight-speed automatic transaxle. Checking the box for the ZTK pack upgrades the ZR1 with stiffer springs and MagneRide damper refinements, larger carbon-ceramic brakes, and aerodynamic dive planes and spoilers. The latter can help generate up to 1,200 pounds of downforce, though the car needs to be travelling at its top speed of 233 mph to produce that figure, essentially rendering it a fantasy boast. Still, that sort of race car tech trickle-down makes the ZR1 a no-brainer for the big L.A. challenge.
Illustration: Ryan Lugo
The Route
The Lap of Los Angeles route we pieced together follows L.A. County’s borders. It begins at the Point Fermin Lighthouse in San Pedro—mainland L.A.’s southernmost point—then jaunts east across Long Beach before heading north over the San Gabriel mountains via Angeles Crest Highway. From there it drops into Antelope Valley and across the desert to the county’s northern border. Finally, we head back southwest via canyon roads before an unavoidable stint on highways and surface streets to pick up the famous and fabulously twisty Mullholland Highway to Malibu. The last stretch essentially follows the coast down to the finish line, looping around the Palos Verdes Peninsula again and back to Point Fermin.
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To make this 10-hour, 335-mile trip trickier on myself and the Corvette—and easier for our photo team—we opted to run this lap during the day, starting during a late winter sunrise and endeavoring to cross the finish before sunset. What’s an L.A. drive without a little traffic?
Or fog, as it turned out. The Corvette rumbled up to the starting line at an ungodly hour well before sunrise. The Victorian-era Point Fermin Lighthouse, which by design is supposed to be easy to spot, wasn’t. The fog was so thick, I could see the ZR1’s aero at work as it caught the carbon lip of the frunk’s radiator outlet and worked its way down the car’s wide hips. The lack of forward visibility made navigating San Pedro’s narrow, hilly streets difficult, and it made discerning the difference between dawn and ambient lighting from the harbor to the east tough to judge.
We’re Off and Running
By 6:24 am, the sun peeked over the horizon, and I figured that was good enough. I anxiously pointed the ZR1 north with the goal of hanging a right onto the famous Vincent Thomas Bridge and across Terminal Island into Long Beach before cutting through the city to avoid the Orange County border en route to the 605 freeway.
Things went wrong quickly. An early-morning accident closed the bridge, funneling the ZR1 and the port’s early rush of tractor-trailers onto the 110 and off the intended route. Making matters worse, instead of helping get me back on course, my phone’s navigation app crashed, forcing me to resort to my shoddy memory as I attempted to get back on track. Knowing I needed to return to Terminal Island to pick up my route, I ducked off the freeway into the morning rush of Wilmington and picked my way down Pacific Coast Highway to Henry Ford Avenue.
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This street—along with ones like Firestone, Nash, and Studebaker—is a vestige of L.A.’s heyday as an automotive manufacturing hub, leading me past grounds that once churned out Model A’s and a bridge still bearing the Ford family name and back onto Terminal Island. I then made my second mistake.
With the soupy fog thickening closer to the water, I turned instead of bearing right, sending me down a two lane-road too narrow and busy with truck traffic to safely turn around in the fog. Pissed, I pulled off into a paved railroad siding at the end, reset my sputtering map app, and put the hammer down, hoping to make up time during the long day ahead. But it wasn’t long before I found myself sitting in the morning freeway rush I hoped to avoid with the early start.
The slow going and morning light made it easy to take stock of my surroundings. Modern Corvette interiors have been forgettable at best, but the 2026 redesign coupled with the full carbon build in our ZR1 test car make the Chevy feel reasonably exotic. The traffic also serves as a good reminder of how far cars have come; not long ago, a mid-engine car with only half the ZR1’s horsepower would’ve been miserable in such a scenario. This Corvette, happily, isn’t. In its default Tour setting, throttle response is linear, shifts from the automatic transmission are smooth, and the ride is relatively comfortable. Outward visibility is even decent, thanks to oversized side mirrors and a camera display mounted in the interior rearview one.
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Two hours after I set off from San Pedro, I made the first pit stop. What was supposed to be a splash and dash before crossing over the San Gabriel Mountains via the glorious ribbon of Angeles Crest Highway was delayed by gawking enthusiasts at the gas station, but with a full fuel tank and more than 300 turns over the road’s 60-mile span, I knew I could make up time.
With little traffic save for other sports cars that happily gave way to the Corvette’s maniacal Cheshire Cat maw, I was left to enjoy the ZR1 in its full glory. This car’s figure-eight test result, the best MotorTrend has ever seen, hints at just how eager it is to devour a pristine strip of asphalt. The ZR1’
