Racing history echoes in the trees at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta. Draped over rolling hills an hour outside of downtown Atlanta, the track has hosted everything from amateur motorcycle races to the Petit LeMans, a 10-hour IMSA SportsCar Championship endurance race. In 2018, the C7 Corvette ZR1 set a new Road Atlanta production-car lap record of 1:26.45, with professional racer Randy Pobst at the wheel.

But records were made to be broken, and less than a year later, a German sports-car maker beat the C7’s lap record by more than a second. So when work began on the mid-engine ZR1, the Corvette team set out to earn back the Road Atlanta record – and to set fast-lap records at four other tracks as well.

“The C7 ZR1 really was the crowning achievement of the front-engine version of the car,” says Chris Barber, Corvette ZR1 lead development engineer. “That car is awesome, but it’s harder to put down power. The mid-engine car is just more friendly – it puts power down easier having that weight in the back.”

Barber isn’t just a Corvette engineer. He’s one of a handful of General Motors development drivers approved to set lap times in the most powerful Corvette ever made. As the 1,064-hp ZR1 finished development and headed toward production, the Corvette team took aim at an unprecedented goal: Setting five production-car lap records at legendary racetracks across America.

Barber was chosen to drive the all-new ZR1 at Road Atlanta, in part because he was there when the C7 ZR1 set the record back in 2018. Barber clocked a 1:22.8 lap time in the new C8 ZR1 – beating the previous production-car record by more than 2 seconds and obliterating the old C7 ZR1 lap time.

“It’s pretty incredible to be that much faster than a Corvette that was already so fast,” Barber says.

Amazingly, Barber set his 1:22.8 lap record on his first full-speed attempt driving the new ZR1 at Road Atlanta – at least in the real world. “I drove the track in our simulator a few times to get an idea,” he says. With a virtual ZR1 loaded up in the sim, the results were promising. “We knew we had a very, very good shot at beating the record,” Barber says. “The hope was to destroy it, and that’s what we ended up doing.”

The Corvette engineering team eventually set records at three other American racetracks: Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; Watkins Glen International in New York; and two configurations of Virginia International Raceway in Alton, Virginia.

“I was thrilled to get Road Atlanta because of the history Corvette has there,” Barber says. “It’s my favorite track in North America. Coming away with a two-second-faster lap record was beyond exciting for me.”

It takes guts to set a fast lap at Road Atlanta. It’s hilly, flinging you over a blind crest as you’re setting up for the tricky Turn 12. On the long, nearly-straight back section from Turn 7 to Turn 10, the ZR1 can rocket to eye-watering speeds – over 180 mph.

“We purposely selected these world-class, very high-profile, very fast tracks,” Barber says. “We didn’t want to make this easy. We wanted to make it impressive, and we knew we had the firepower to beat whatever was out there.”

Perfecting high-performance vehicles like the Corvette family involves lots of test driving on racetracks. Being a development driver is a dream job for car-enthusiast engineers, but setting the Road Atlanta lap record required Barber to access a different set of skills compared to his usual vehicle evaluation drives.

“Most of my job is not going as absolutely fast as possible,” he says. “It’s not really what you want to do. We’re trying to make a good, easy to drive, robust car that we can put in the hands of any customer to go have fun. Going out and running fast laps over and over doesn’t accomplish that.”

On a typical evaluation drive, Barber and his colleagues concentrate on every nuance of the vehicle. “We need to think, what would I change? What does the car need? It’s a different mindset.” Preparing for the lap-record attempt was a mental exercise. “I spent a fair amount of time watching videos and driving on the simulator, just trying to turn off my development-driver brain and think more race-car driver.”

“At Road Atlanta, there are two very, very high-speed, high-commitment corners – Turn 1 and Turn 12,” Barber says. “The run toward Turn 1 is a somewhat short straightaway, but in the ZR1 you’re coming onto the straight at like 125 miles per hour. You brush the brakes and turn into Turn 1 and the car kind of slides its way in. Then the track starts to go uphill and picks up camber. You kind of scare the crap out of yourself, throwing the car in and hoping it’s going to catch when you hit that hill on the camber, which is the fast way to get through it. You’ve got to really send it in and just wait for that track profile to save you. It takes a lot of commitment. It’s really easy to lose a lot of time by going a little too slow into Turn 1.”

Turns 3, 4 and 5 make up “The Esses,” a serpentine right-left-right wiggle that tumbles down one hill and bounds up the next. It’s meant to be taken flat-out, no brakes. A short straightaway sends cars piling into the tight, slow, back-to-back Turns 6 and 7.

“You come off a pretty tight Turn 7 and then you have this really, really long straightaway,” Barber says. “The ZR1 just murders that straightaway. It’s so much fun to just fly down that thing. It’s doing well over 180 miles per hour at the end of that straight.”

Hard on the brakes into the tightly clenched left-right combo of Turn 10, followed by a sweeping right-hand Turn 11, and then comes the most challenging curve.

“Turn 12 is famous. You’re going up a hill pretty much blind. Then you come down the hill looking at a wall and the giant spectator building right in front of you. You have to stay in the throttle and commit to this really high-speed right-hand corner with maybe 10 feet of grass between you and the wall. It’s really, really intimidating as a driver to look at that and stay in the throttle when you’re going well over a hundred miles an hour coming out of 12. It’s just a very intimidating track.”

Intimidating, but in the ZR1, “it’s a super fun track because the car is just so capable,” Barber says. “Its strength is power. We’ve got awesome grip and handling and aerodynamics, but power is where the car really shines. That long straightaway is one place where the new ZR1 just walks away from the competition. With the mid-engine layout, we can get on power quicker than a lot of cars. This new ZR1 just screams out of the corners. Once you hit fourth gear, most cars taper off, but this car just keeps going.”

Horsepower alone can’t set a lap record, of course. “The stopping power of the car is just so immense,” Barber says. “And having the ZTK package with the big downforce was another big enabler. You can actually use that power, not just in the straightaway, but in those high-speed corners as well. That’s where a lot of that lap time comes from – big power on the straightaways and then maintaining it through those corners.”

Setting five lap records across the U.S. wasn’t just about showing off the ZR1’s muscle – it demonstrates the car’s flexibility and user-friendliness, traits that aren’t usually in the foreground in supercars with more than a thousand horsepower.

“We didn’t necessarily develop the car to do lap records,” Barber says. “We want the car to be approachable and drivable for a range of customers. We want a car that’s very robust and easy to drive for any driving style. That’s part of why we wanted to do these four different tracks with four different drivers. We all have different driving styles, and we want to prove the point that it doesn’t require a hired professional race car driver to achieve these results.”

While every Corvette development driver has years of experience driving high-performance vehicles on track, and many of them have competed in amateur racing events, none of them are professional racers. “The fact that four different drivers with different driving styles could go achieve these lap times on five different tracks speaks to the bandwidth of the car, how easy and approachable it is,” Barber says. “You could easily make a car that one person likes, but that’s very difficult to drive. We make the car approachable and confident and then the lap time comes naturally.”

A racetrack lap record requires perfect weather conditions. The sweet spot lies in a contradictory zone – engines run best when breathing cool air, but tires generate the most grip on warm pavement. Even a brief rainstorm can scuttle the day.

“The first day we get there, we had a dry morning, so I was strapped in and ready to go, trying to beat the rain to get my first practice session,” Barber says. “It started raining literally the moment I pulled onto the track.”

The team waited out the rain, running practice laps and gathering data for other projects as the track surface dried off. That afternoon, with just a few minutes left before the track would shut down, they decided to try for a timed lap. “I didn’t necessarily feel like I was 100% ready to go,” Barber says, “but we figured, it’s dry, let’s give it a shot.”

On the first timed attempt, on the first day of testing at Road Atlanta, Barber drove the new ZR1 into the history book.

“In hindsight, I feel super lucky to have gotten such a good lap time on that first run,” Barber says. As an engineer and a racer, Barber naturally has a critical eye. “Obviously, when you go back and scrutinize the data, you can find little things here and there, but I don’t think I left a huge amount on the table. If everything had come together perfectly, maybe we could have knocked a few more tenths off, but beating a lap record by over two seconds is nothing to be ashamed about.”

The Road Atlanta record is the culmination of a lifelong dream for Barber. “Honestly, if you had told me as a kid that I was going to set a lap record in a Corvette at a world-class racetrack, I would have said, that’s my dream job,” he says. “I always used to pay attention to lap records for all the supercars. Now to be part of that history is very prideful for me.”

Just a few months ago, Barber was on hand in Germany when General Motors President Mark Reuss drove the Corvette ZR1 to a top speed of 233 mph – making it the fastest car ever built by an American auto manufacturer, the fastest current production car priced under $1 million, and the fastest factory-stock Corvette on earth. “When we got the top speed record, I said it was the crowning achievement of my career,” Barber says. “Now I think I’ve already topped that. It’s going exponential.”