Last year, Chevrolet sold 88,249 Camaros, earning a 37-percent share of the sports car market. Its next closest competitor, the Ford Mustang, sold only 70,438 units for a 29-percent market share.
In the luxury sports car market, Chevrolet’s Corvette took top honors, selling 13,164 units to earn a 28-percent share of the market. That more than doubles the sales of the second-place finisher, the Porsche 911, which sold 6,016 units to rack up a 13-percent market share.
Chevy expects that lead to stretch in 2012 with the launch of the high-performance, 580-horsepower Camaro ZL1, which, like its 638-horsepower Corvette ZR1 stablemate, the automaker bills as appropriate for both daily driving and track use off the showroom floor.
To prove their point, Chevrolet recently took both the Corvette ZR1 and the Camaro ZL1 to Virginia International Raceway (VIR). As the videos below indicate, the Corvette ZR1 (wearing Michelin Pilot Sport Cup tires) lapped VIR’s Grand Course in 2:45.6, which beat the existing published lap time for any production car.
The Camaro ZL1 lapped the track in 2:52.4, which is some six seconds faster than the lap record of a 2011 Ford Shelby GT500. As we’ve previously reported, however, Ford has upped the ante on its 2013 Shelby GT500, which will come to market with a Camaro ZL1-beating 650-horsepower.
