Dodge, and other Demons
Photo: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles
The Demon deepthroats the air out of the room.
That’s Five,000 liters of air, which is equal to the lung capacity of eight hundred humans, an engineer told us. We were being taunted. It was only a test. A recording of an engine revving at a horrifying volume.
This isn’t the beginning sequence of a Koji Igarashi game, but the sound of the Dodge Demon. I grew up with this sound, when my father, who commenced his career as a Dodge engineer, displayed off his love for all things mechanical.
When I was a kid, my father took me to the Milan Dragway in Michigan, where I covered my ears to block out the screams of the top-fuel dragsters. We didn’t wear earplugs. My father wore his cherry-red Dodge Boys jacket to demonstrate off that he was a Chrysler man. We always stayed for the entire race; my father never liked to leave a competition until the thing had ended. Afterward, I could smell the race gas on my clothes and my ears rung from the earsplitting roar of the engines.
The day the Demon was due to make its debut on Lucas Oil Speedway, the racing gods had other ideas. The forecast was for scattered showers and patches of sun, but the sky opened up and a penalizing rain coursed down from 7AM until late afternoon. Lightening blazed through the sky, and the only audible rumble was the reverberation of thunder in the distance. By the time the rain stopped, the harm was done. Word was, no one in Indy had ever seen the track flood like that. The Demon was compelled to remain idle. The Christmas tree lights were abate. (Editor’s note: a Christmas tree is haul racing speak for a mechanism that signals on your mark, set, go! Or if you leave too early, false commence.)
Photo: Tamara Warren / The Brink
A cadre of journalists had the chance to observe Demon in activity last week on its home turf: the quarter-mile unclothe of a racetrack in Indianapolis, the symbolic heart of racing country. I leaped at the chance to drive the infrequent Demon — of which, only Three,300 will be made. I signed up for wave one, to get to drive very first, but it wasn’t meant to be.
In case you don’t frequent haul strips or have been overlooking the rekindled horsepower wars waging among Detroit automakers, Demon is a souped-up variant of the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat. It’s the fastest production car ever made — so swift that it’s been banned by the National Hot Rod Association. Dodge is proud of its prowess and added this point prominently into its press kit. The numbers don’t lie: eight hundred forty horsepower and seven hundred seventy pound-feet of torque, a 0–60 in Two.Trio seconds, and a 9.65-second quarter-mile time.
“I dreamed this to be a middle finger to the competition,” Mark Trostle, the designer in charge of exterior design for FCA, told our group as we waited the rain out in a soggy tent at the track. He pointed at the nips and tucks that have also added to that spectacle improvement, such as a shorter spoiler to reduce haul.
Photo: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles
The Demon’s prowess comes down to math equations. “F=MA,” as the head engineer framed it: Force = Mass times Acceleration. To achieve its massive speed and torque, Dodge extracted two hundred pounds from the car. “Every nut and bolt was looked at,” he said.
The Demon may be the last of its kind, a staunch, unapologetic defender of Detroit’s past and all things bulbous American muscle. “We’re not soulless, driverless pods yet,” said Tim Kuniskis, the head of passenger cars for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, in defense of the internal combustion engine, as we waited at the track to dry. Kuniskis made the case for why a company is building this niche vehicle at a time when, as a society, we are on the precipice of electrification and facing a request for cars that emit less emissions. And tho’ the Demon seems incongruent to the overall trends, the enthusiasm of aging baby boomers and youthfull Rapid & Furious fans is enough of a business case to justify this last hurrah. It’s also worth noting they didn’t spend money to build the car from the ground up, but instead made tweaks to juice up an existing model to the max.
Another engineer walked us through the three different ways that you can drive the Demon straight down the quarter mile, including using a TransBrake, a haul racing cue that harkens back to the one thousand nine hundred sixty heyday of racing not seen in any other production car.
But there would be no demonizing that day. Mother Nature had other plans. A soaking raw track is no place to haul race. Tires require dry surfaces to stick to the pavement. Jokes were made about Dodge being disciplined for the audacity to make such a car, a more efficient V8 than the cars of the early ‘70s. But it’s still not a gasoline saver and it’s the very first production car that runs on 100+ high-octane unleaded fuel. While owners might stunt with this cars on public roads, in interest of public safety, perhaps they shouldn’t. Driving in a straight line on a track is another story, however.
When I left the track to make my flight, at very first I felt a profound sense of frustration, a ridiculous reaction to missing out on what was only a 9-second car rail. It’s hard to make the case for why regular folks who don’t care about cars should pay attention to this otherworldly animal, that on the surface seems to be up to no good. It may seem at odds with everything that technology and progress stand for — but not from where I’m sitting.
Because haul racing is about pushing the thresholds.
When I was kid, automotive engineers like my dad seemed like they lived in the future. They toiled away on cars that wouldn’t be seen until the next decade. There was a top secret sense about what they did behind the gates at the proving grounds, and that they were pushing toward doing fresh things, too. It was a feeling that carried from the R&D departments in Detroit down to the workers who worked long hours building the cars, that they were contributing something that was making a statement in the world.
Photo: Tamara Warren / The Brink
While I wasn’t enamored by cars back then, I did appreciate my father’s enthusiasm for his life’s work. Somewhere along the way, several years after I became a journalist, I challenged myself to write about cars. My father got a kick out of my newfound hit and sent me frequent tutorials explaining how different engines worked and what it truly meant to get butts in seats. I wrote about all kinds of cars, but whenever I had the chance to test out a Dodge, he was most amazed. After I drove a Viper on the track for the very first time, he beamed and told me I was legit. Cars re-created our connection. It was cemented when I hooked up and later married a drag-racing hobbyist, self-appointed president of the local car club: the Brooklyn Dodges.
Photo: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles
Long after my father retired, he still didn’t like it when I parked any other model in his driveway when I visited. Eventually, he paved a fresh space for me on the side of the house, where he wouldn’t have to see other makes and models polluting his driveway. That’s the kind of spirit that inspired the verve for Demon.
It’s been over a year since my father died. And there is a little part of me that is okay with living in the anticipation of the rail that never happened, so I wouldn’t have to be sad about not being able to call up my dad and tell him about what it felt like to drive.
By the time my flight boarded to leave Indy, the sky had turned a gauzy, serene pink, and the sun peeked out. It struck me that sometimes imagining an practice is just as rewarding as living through the actual thing. Other writers were able to stick around and drive the Demon on another day, like my friend and fellow Detroit native Lawrence Ulrich who drove the Demon like hell for The Drive, and Elana Scherr, editor of Roadkill, who wrote about her test drive for the audience that lives and breathes this stuff. For me, living with the anticipation of a ridiculous rail would be enough to sustain me — at least until the Demon strikes again.
Demon has already become a legend before it hits the streets, a gut punch that is in step with the times, as much as its paradoxically opposed to what’s happening in the rest of the world. It’s a metaphor for the moment as we race to a finish line, without knowing what’s at the end. When muscle cars were very first made, we were imagining the Moon, only now we imagine Mars. While I appreciate the obsessive aspect of wanting more, my perspective has shifted. Instead of more power, I’d trade it in for a little more precious time.