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  • This 900 hp Honda engine Corvette runs circles around the LS engine
  • This K24 engine has forged internals and a massive 67mm turbo
  • Honda’s K24 saves hundreds of pounds while making hundres more horses

Hey. You with the LS engine in your stock C6 Chevrolet Corvette. Ready to pray at the altar of VTEC? Because this 900 hp Honda K24 will whoop your Corvette both up and down the street. And then it’ll do it again. Some nutter put all this in an old ‘Vette. Yeah, the C6 is “old” now. Weird, but at least it’s depreciated enough to make a K-swap cool instead of sacrilegious.

An orange C6 Chevrolet Corvette shot from the front 3/4
The C6 platform is known for its modability | Don Kelsen via Getty Images

900 hp C6 Chevrolet Corvettes aren’t new, but Honda power is

To be fair, people have been thrown 900-odd horsepower in the C6 Chevrolet Corvette for a while now. And to be fair to the parishioners of the Holy Saint of the LS Engine, people have been using those engines to get there. However, a little Honda engine is something far more unique. Plus, it might make some people upset, and what are sports cars for if not for making the neighbors mad?

Unruly Motorsports out of Georgia decided to do just that. So, they set about putting an ultra-reliable Honda K24 engine in their C6 Corvette. Obviously, all this wasn’t done to make the neighbors mad. In reality, the shop decided to do so because of the drag racing benefits to be found in Honda’s most popular Civic engine. Namely, weight.

A 2-speed Powerglide was needed for this K24 swap

With all the bits and pieces attached, the LS engine originally found in the C6 ‘Vette is somewhere around 500 lbs. The K24? More like 300. So, clearly saving 200 lbs is to your benefit when you need to move from one end of a drag strip to another. All that to say nothing of the transmission. Unruly Motorsports fitted a 2-speed Powerglide drag racing transmission to help manage all 900 of those horses. Swapping an engine is no easy task, but the benefits are clearly worth it.

Now, about that K-swap. Unfortunately, a K24 doesn’t just make 900 hp out of the box. You need a few things first. Things like forged rods and pistons, a big fat 67mm turbo, and a closed deck engine block. To be fair, many of those things are just to keep the motor from popping like a shaken soda can when boost is added.

K-swaps are the new Chevy small block

Really, it’s pretty easy to see why Unruly Motorsports would take to the K-swap. Weight is the enemy of every drag racer, and so long as there’s enough of it to keep the tires on the ground, the rest can be left behind. Sure, it might make some LS engine purists a little upset, but who cares? Someone loves this car, and that’s really all that matters to us, LS or not.

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Chase Bierenkoven

Chase Bierenkoven has been obsessed with cars his whole life and now finds joy in sharing what he’s learned from his own daily drivers. Chase earned a Bachelor of Science in Criminal Justice and Criminology with a focus on legal studies from the Metropolitan State University of Denver and quickly became an automotive journalist. When he isn’t writing, Chase is either driving his passion project, a 2004 BMW M3 in Carbon Schwartz Metallic, or playing around Colorado’s terrain, mainly mountain biking and skiing.