What started in 2003 is now one of the largest land speed contests in the country. Held twice a year, the Texas Mile is a three-day event where participants from all around the globe ascend on Chase Field Industrial Complex in Beeville, Texas, to try and run their vehicles as fast as possible across a standing one-mile course.

The Peitz Performance C8 performed better than expected.

Just about any make and model of vehicle you can think of is represented. Italian exotics, American muscle, trucks, and motorcycles all show up to run all out. For the fastest of the fast, the Texas Mile has its 200 mph club. Even with all of the advancements in modern sports cars, getting into the 200 mph club is no easy feat. It typically takes upgrading a car with more horsepower, more aero, and having a driver with the guts to stay on the accelerator. Enter Alex Peitz and his team at Peitz Performance Tunes in Tomball, Texas.

Alex Peitz and his team developed the twin-turbo system for Emelia Hartford’s C8 Corvette.

If the name sounds familiar, you may remember Peitz Performance Tuning from designing, installing, and tuning the twin-turbo system on Emelia Hartford’s C8 Corvette. Since that time, Peitz has expanded its C8 turbo system offerings to include four packages of varying horsepower levels. The Bravo Lite package will give your C8 a mild 150 horsepower increase, while its flagship Alpha package can more than double the factory output of the LT2 engine by adding 800 horsepower. It must be mentioned the Alpha package, as well as the Bravo Plus package, require engine rebuilds using components that are up to the task of making four-digit power numbers.

The Peitz Performance Tunes C8 twin-turbo packages have been developed over the last three years.

With introductions made, let’s dive into how Peitz Performance Tunes took Scott Underwood’s stock C8 Corvette and built it into one of the newest members of the 200 mph club at this year’s Texas Mile. The foundation consists of a 2021 Corvette Z51 coupe in beautiful Zeus Bronze Metallic. Once Underwood dropped the C8 at Peitz Performance, the team got to work on the heart transplant.

To turn this C8 into an Alpha, the stock LT2 was pulled and replaced with a built 390 cubic-inch stroker long block from Late Model Engines (LME). We covered these trick LME stroker LT2 packages in another article that you can read more about here. While it retains the stock camshaft and DOD lifters, this LT2 has LME’s ported cylinder heads, hardened pushrods, trunion and valve spring upgrades. A billet intake manifold from LME uses the stock throttle body to direct boost to the cylinders from the Extreme Turbo Systems (ETS) twin turbo kit. The ETS turbo kit is a quality system, although it should be noted that the customer had already purchased it prior to taking the C8 to Peitz Performance.

The LME billet intake performs exceptionally well and looks great, contrasting with this C8’s Zeus Bronze Metallic paint.

To feed this beast a healthy diet of E85, Peitz designed its Alpha Spec fuel system to make use of the stock direct injection and a secondary set of 2,200 cc Deatschwerks (DW) port injectors in the LME billet intake. The fuel system works by filling the factory tank, which feeds fuel to a DW surge tank that houses three 450 lph fuel pumps, also from DW. One of the pumps sends the corn fuel to the high-pressure direct injection fuel pump through a pressure regulator. The return side of that regulator feeds the port injection fuel rails, where there is a secondary pressure regulator. The return on the secondary regulator sends fuel back to the surge tank and, from there, it returns to the factory tank. The two additional 450 lph DW fuel pumps are triggered to activate by Peitz’s Alpha Spec Delta Control Module (DCM) when there is 2 psi or greater of boost present.

The secondary fuel system mounted in the C8 frunk looks complex, but it is a beautiful solution to fueling a 1,000-horsepower LT2.

Complex problems call for complex solutions. – Alex Peitz, Peitz Performance Tuning

By now, most of us are aware of the tuning headaches involved with GM’s Global B ECU architecture and modifying the C8 Corvette to make big power. Peitz designed its own solution with its Delta Control Module (DCM). It is a complex control module that could have its own article, but for now, we’ll give you the condensed details. You can check out the Peits Performance Tunes YouTube channel if you would like more detailed explanations of the DCM from Alex. The DCM is an in-line module that allows the end user, shop, or Alex himself to make adjustments to the signals that are being sent to the car’s ECU from the intake air temperature (IAT) sensor, mass airflow (MAF) sensor, throttle position sensor (TPS), and others. The DCM has the capability to add or pull timing, control fuel trims, activate secondary fuel systems, control nitrous solenoids, and many other features. Additionally, the DCM has a boost-by-gear option and can store up to six user-selectable boost profiles, and it can control a secondary port injection system.

We honestly weren’t really trying to go too crazy, but were more so collecting data and happened to hit this mark! – Alex Peitz, Peitz Performance Tuning

Once Alex and the team had Underwood’s C8 back together and on the dyno, the car made a maximum of 1,002 horsepower at the rear wheels with the DCM on profile five. With the car complete, Underwood and the Peitz Performance team were ready to make a rip at the Texas Mile and collect data to refine the tuning and setup on the car. “We did not know what it was going to do, and we were playing conservative and logging and collecting data,” Alex stated. As part of the data collection and sorting of the car, Alex had the DCM on profile four which makes 879 horsepower at the wheels.

It turns out that profile five wasn’t needed to hit the 200 mph mark. With the C8 on profile four and Underwood’s good friend Kevin Leonard behind the wheel, the Peitz Performance-built C8 made entry into the 200 mph club with a standing mile pass at 201.2 mph. So I guess the only thing to do now is to continue perfecting the tune, turn it up to profile 5, and see what happens at the next Texas Mile event this coming October.