2018 Dodge Demon Does a Random Burnout, Fights Its Sticky Tires

A Demon spinning its tires looks like ordinary internet content until you understand what is happening underneath. This was the first production car with a TransBrake, the first delivered from the factory on drag radials, and the first with an air conditioning system repurposed to chill its own intake air. The burnout was not showing off, it was a required procedure. Read on for what made the 840-horsepower Challenger genuinely unprecedented.

Footage of a muscle car doing a burnout is the most disposable content on the internet, which makes it strange that this particular clip is worth stopping for. The car is a 2018 Challenger SRT Demon, and what looks like an ordinary display of tire smoke is actually a demonstration of hardware that had never appeared on a production vehicle before, working against tires that no manufacturer had previously been willing to fit at the factory. The smoke is a side effect. Underneath it, a driveline component is doing something no showroom car had ever been engineered to do, and the tires are the reason it had to.

The TransBrake No Other Factory Car Had

The Demon introduced the first TransBrake ever offered on a production vehicle. The system locks the output shaft of the eight-speed automatic transmission, holding the car completely stationary while allowing the driver to build engine speed to roughly 2,350 rpm against that lock, then release it instantly through a steering wheel paddle. Drag racers have used transbrakes for decades in purpose-built cars, but no manufacturer had ever validated one for warranty, emissions, and durability testing on a car sold through dealerships. Doing so required substantial reinforcement of the transmission internals and a control strategy that would not destroy the driveline the first time an inexperienced owner used it.

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Torque Reserve and What It Does Before Launch

Torque Reserve worked alongside it and is the less visible half of the system. When engaged, it closes the supercharger bypass valve and cuts fuel to selected cylinders while advancing spark timing, so the supercharger builds boost while the engine is held at a fixed speed rather than only after the car begins to move. The result is a substantial pressure increase available the instant the TransBrake releases, rather than the lag inherent in spinning a positive-displacement blower up from idle. Launch assist then monitors driveshaft speed and momentarily reduces torque if it detects wheel hop, protecting the axles from shock loading.

Factory Drag Radials Were the Real First

None of that is usable without tires that can hold it, which is why the genuinely unprecedented part of the Demon was the rubber. It shipped on Nitto NT05R street-legal drag radials in 315/40R18 at all four corners, the first time any manufacturer had delivered a car from the factory on drag radials. A drag radial uses a soft compound and a comparatively stiff sidewall with minimal tread pattern, engineered to plant a huge contact patch under acceleration and to absorb the shock of a hard launch. The trade-off is that they are poor in rain, wear quickly, and are legal for street use only by a narrow margin.

Why Sticky Tires Need Heat

They also do not work cold, and this is precisely what the clip shows. A drag radial’s soft compound needs to be brought up to temperature before it develops meaningful grip, which is the entire functional purpose of a burnout at a drag strip. Below that temperature the tire is genuinely worse than a good performance street tire, offering less grip and behaving unpredictably. The Demon’s Line Lock function holds the front brakes so the driver can spin the rears to build heat without moving the car, converting what looks like showing off into a required procedure. A cold-tire Demon is a car fighting its own equipment.

840 Horsepower, But Only on the Right Fuel

The engine behind it was a 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI producing 840 horsepower and 770 lb-ft of torque, but only on 100-plus octane race fuel with the high-octane powertrain control module installed. On ordinary 91-octane pump gas the same engine made 808 horsepower and 717 lb-ft. That dual rating was unusual and honest, and it meant most Demons spent most of their lives in the lower state of tune. The supercharger displaced 2.7 liters, up from the Hellcat’s 2.4, spun to 25,000 rpm, and pushed roughly 14.5 psi of boost, with redline raised to 6,500 rpm.

The Cooling Systems That Made It Survivable

Keeping that alive required cooling systems that did not exist elsewhere. The SRT Power Chiller diverts the air conditioning system’s refrigerant through a heat exchanger in the supercharger’s charge cooler circuit, dropping intake air temperature before a run in a way no conventional intercooler could manage. An After-Run Chiller continues circulating coolant and running the low-temperature radiator fan after the engine is switched off, pulling residual heat out of the supercharger and charge cooler so the car can make consecutive passes. Both systems exist because 840 horsepower generates heat faster than any passive system can shed it.

The Largest Functional Hood Scoop Ever Fitted

Feeding the engine was the Air-Grabber hood scoop, measuring 45.2 square inches of opening, the largest functional hood scoop ever fitted to a production car. It fed a dual-path intake that could also draw from a driver-side inlet, and the whole system was designed to deliver the coldest, densest air available. Details like that are what separated the Demon from a tuned Hellcat. Almost every component in the induction, cooling, and driveline path was either new or substantially reengineered, which is why the car took years to develop rather than being a software calibration and a smaller supercharger pulley.

A 9.65 and a Guinness World Record

The results were verified rather than claimed. The Demon ran an NHRA-certified 9.65-second quarter mile at 140 mph, reached 60 mph in 2.3 seconds, and generated 1.8 g on launch. It also lifted its front wheels 2.92 feet off the ground from a standing start, a figure Guinness World Records certified as the longest wheelie by a production car. The NHRA responded by banning it from sanctioned competition unless fitted with a roll cage, since anything running quicker than 9.99 seconds requires one, and Dodge treated that prohibition as the single best piece of marketing the car could have received.

3,300 Cars and a One-Dollar Crate

Production was limited to 3,300 cars, 3,000 for the United States and 300 for Canada, built only for the 2018 model year and delivered starting in the fall of 2017. The base price was $84,995, and the Demon Crate, containing the drag wheels and tires, a floor jack, a torque wrench, the high-octane PCM, and various weight-reduction parts, was priced at exactly one dollar. That crate is now a significant factor in valuation, because a Demon with its complete original crate and documentation is worth meaningfully more than one without, and plenty of them were separated from their cars years ago.

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