Woman.Driven YouTuber Showcases Camaro ZL1 1LE Upgrade
After she raced her Camaro ZL1 1LE, Doris needed some suspension upgrades. From her garage, she swaps out the upper control arms.
Like most owners of fast cars, it’s pretty hard to leave the car perfectly stock, especially when the vehicle in question is actually being raced at high speeds, at its fullest potential. Doris, a female automotive and racing enthusiast, owns a handful of cool race cars. In addition, she works on them herself. And even better, she chronicles most of her mods and upgrades on her awesome YouTube channel Women.Driven. From the hot and arid state of Arizona, she makes installation videos of herself dialing in her Shelby GT250 and Camaro ZL1 1LE to be exactly how she’d like.
“In Arizona, these trackers are just very slow around these slow-speed corners, where I really have to slow down a lot,” says Doris in her video. “They’re very tight corners, and the car just doesn’t feel as flat as I’d like it to be. I could feel the weight shifting, and I think there’s room for improvement with that.” The parts she decided to swap out were BMR upper control arms, which are advertised to launch harder, reduce wheel hop, and add cornering consistency.
This is a perfect modification for Chevy’s supercharged track car. The 2019 Camaro ZL1 1LE is fine-tuned to do exactly what Doris is doing with it, with a 650 horsepower supercharged, 6.2 liter V8 LT4. Adding to the respectable power figures is the amount of torque: 650 ft lbs. It also came out of the box with racing-ready tires, Brembo brakes, and a carbon fiber wing (a first-ever for General Motors) to help keep the car on the ground better. Now, besides the incredible American beast of a Camaro, the first thing we noticed is the fact that her cars and her garage set up are things we all dream of. There are lifts aplenty, optimal lighting, clean floors, and a gigantic bay door. Before the wrenching commenced, Doris walked us through what she’d have to do to swap the parts.
‘In Arizona, these trackers are very slow around corners… and the car doesn’t feel as flat as I’d like. I could feel the weight shifting, and I think there’s room for improvement with that.’
“It should be fairly simple,” says Doris. “The only thing I’m worried about is that back bolt being hard to get because there’s such little room to get to it.” Though she was nervous, she made it look fairly simple. In the middle, she paused the video to say that she accidentally tightened the adjuster nuts towards the center instead of away from it — so it took her some time to correct that mistake, but once corrected, reassembling it all wasn’t bad at all. To Doris, the worst part of the job was the Arizona heat.
“I’m exhausted — maybe it’s because it’s just so hot and humid in this garage,” she says. “But… That’s it for the upper control arms. It wasn’t too bad… Just don’t make the same mistake I made.”
At the end of the video, she did let us in on the fact that more installation videos on the Camaro are coming, especially since she’s got more suspension parts coming in the mail for it. The Camaro being on blocks isn’t keeping her from being on the track, though. She told the camera that she’d be racing in the Mustang while she waits for everything to get in the mail. Until next time, Doris.
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