port the heads and change cams and do little tuner tricks with the computer to see if we could get over the 400 rear-wheel horsepower mark."
    Ron appreciated the chance to be the Rippie Z06 test mule and so advertises DRM on the side of his car. "I don’t want to insinuate it was free, but they gave me a good price."
    The final tuning showed 406 rear-wheel horsepower on Rippie’s dyno. That’s about 477 horsepower at the crank. For the record, the stock ‘01 Z06 had 385 crank horsepower, or about 330 to the rear wheels. Even the ‘02 Z06 is almost 75 horses short of this Rippie tuner Corvette, which is a fairly mild modification considering that the cubes and valve sizes remain stock.
    The first statistic everybody wants to know is the quarter-mile ET. Ron doesn’t credit himself as a