This New Chevrolet Camaro Carbon Performance Package Is Such A Tease With New NASCAR Car On The Way
The Chevrolet Camaro went out of production in 2023, but GM isn’t done with it yet.
The Chevrolet Performance Parts department has launched a new Carbon Performance Package for the discontinued sports car.
“We have a group of folks that do this outside of work,” Mirza Grebovic, Engineering Group Manager for GM Performance Parts, said on GM News. “We do this at work, we do it before bed, we do it before lunch…”
The kit was designed for the top dog 650 hp Camaro ZL1 and includes a ZL1 1LE-style splitter, rocker extensions, a spoiler and a hood insert that are all made of carbon fiber.
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John Kalbfell, Senior Performance Part Design Release Engineer, says the fully functional parts increase the ZL1’s downforce to within 5% of a factory-built ZL1 1LE’s, which gets additional updates and is tuned to be a more hardcore track car.
“We put it in the development team’s hands, a lot of the people that worked on the original car,” Kalbfell said “and they did laps at Milford [GM’s proving ground] to make sure the aero balance was correct, to make sure the car was stable, make sure the car cornered the way they wanted it.”
Kalbfell said the team worked with GM’s motorsports tech center in Concord, N.C., to tap into some of its NASCAR aerodynamics expertise.
Exact pricing for the package hasn’t been announced, but a set of Tech Bronze wheels is an optional add-on.
It’s interesting that Chevrolet would choose to highlight the Camaro right now given that it’s been out of production for nearly two years. The brand has recently indicated that it has no plans to introduce a new one anytime soon and the Corvette is the only car model of any type that it currently sells.
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However, Chevy is about to unveil a new NASCAR Cup Series body for 2026 and hasn’t yet said what it will look like. The current car still uses the Camaro body, although it took the Camaro name off of it for 2025 and badged it as a Chevrolet.
NASCAR has already approved the new body. Previously, its rules didn’t allow updates to a car unless it was still in production, but it is possible it changed those to accommodate Chevy continuing to use the Camaro body. Other options include turning it into a Frankenstein combining the Cup Series coupe body with the face of the mid-engine Corvette or one of Chevy’s SUVs. It could also do something entirely unexpected.
That would be the introduction of an entirely new production car, which could either be a new Camaro or a resurrected nameplate like Impala or Chevelle. GM recently made the surprise decision to introduce a new Cadillac CT5 in 2027 and that sports sedan is built on the same platform that was used for the Camaro, so it’s not out of the question that it will be joined by a new Chevrolet model.
We should know soon enough as the new NASCAR Cup Series car is expected to begin on-track testing in the coming weeks and should be publicly revealed before the end of the year.
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