Meet the 800bhp Chevrolet Camaro SS Yenko

The film 2Fast2Furious features a drag race, as you knew it would. In it we see a Yenko Camaro in Le Mans Blue smoking its tyres. Brian O’Connor wins the car and then manages to use it to jump onto a boat, before the car gets totalled.

If you think you want some of that, then you’ll need one of these new Camaro SS Yenkos, or perhaps that should be Yenkoes.

Don Yenko decided that GM’s decision to limit the V8s in their Camaros to just 400 cubic inches (6.6-litres) was corporate bed-wetting taken too far. So in the late 1960s the racer and tuner shoved a 427 cubic inch V8 into a Camaro, and Yenko Camaros were on the map.

Now they’re made under licence by Speciality Vehicle Engineering (SVE), some decades after Yenko himself was killed in a plane crash. He may be gone, but his guiding principle of more power and more Camaro lives on.

SVE has just released another power upgrade, with new heads, pistons, the lot. And one really big supercharger. The combination produces 800bhp and 750lb ft of torque. Gulp.

The styling is every bit as restrained as the power, ie not very, all of it offset by those lairy (but correct ‘60s Yenko period style) 20in alloys. The badging, attitude and general ‘ornery aggression on display is quite something. No apologies here, no ‘after you, I insist’. Just 800bhp and smoking tyres.