It’s always the 600-plus horsepower Nürburgring-special cars with meaningless lap-times and quarter-mile runs making the headlines, especially when it comes to the Chevy Camaro. However, today all the excitement is around the base Camaro and the turbo four-cylinder motor bolted in under the hood.
Yes, you read that right. The base Camaro will come with a 2.0-liter turbo inline-four cylinder pumping out 275 hp and 295 lb-ft of torque. The Turbo 1LE Camaro also gets the track-tuned chassis from the V6 1LE including upgraded suspension, bigger brakes, drive modes and a six-speed manual transmission. That’s less than half the power you’ll find in the range-topping, track dominating Camaro ZL1, but when was the last time you needed 650 horsepower?
Now that there is a smaller, lighter engine up front, the base-Camaro overall is lighter and drives with a perfect 50/50 weight distribution, making the car better in the corners — where the real fun is. According to Moto1.com, Chevy benchmarked the new performance-focused Camaro against the Honda Civic Type R, VW Golf R and the Hyundai Veloster N. Pricing wasn’t announce, but based on the group Chevy is gunning for, expect the tuned four-cylinder Camaro to land somewhere around the $30,000 mark.
So, just to sum things up: the new Camaro is lighter, handles better, gets better gas mileage, has a six-speed stick shift and, with a new front-end redesign, looks good too? Did Chevy just make an outstanding enthusiast car? On paper, it looks like that way.
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