COMET TORCHES HELLCAT! ’62 MERCURY COMET VS ’15 DODGE CHALLENGER HELLCAT AT RT66!

At an RT66 Test N Tune event in 2015, Rich Kent’s E85-fueled 1962 Mercury Comet did something a brand-new 707-horsepower Dodge Challenger Hellcat never expected: it beat it clean off the line. The video’s own description reveals the Hellcat had run nearly three seconds quicker just a week earlier, turning a simple grudge race into a years-long argument about driving versus horsepower. Watch to see the run that started the controversy.

A 1962 Mercury Comet should not be able to embarrass a brand-new Dodge Challenger Hellcat, a car that left the factory a week earlier running numbers that would humble most modern supercars. Yet at RT66 Test N Tune on a spring afternoon in 2015, that is precisely what happened, and the way it happened, the Hellcat spinning its 707 factory horsepower into smoke while an ancient Mercury simply left the line clean, is the reason this video still gets passed around drag racing forums a decade later. What the comments section calls “the controversy” starts right at the tree, and it never really lets up.

A 429 Big Block Built for E85, Not Nostalgia

Rich Kent’s Comet is no stock survivor. Under the hood sits a 429 cubic inch Ford big block, fed E85 ethanol fuel, built into a car the description lists at 3,675 pounds in street trim, light by modern standards but not dramatically so for a fifty-year-old Mercury. Kent’s son-in-law was behind the wheel for this particular pass, running the Comet to a 12.16-second quarter mile at 110.20 miles per hour, numbers that would have been drag strip royalty when the car was brand new in 1962 and remain genuinely respectable against a factory-built modern supercar more than half a century later.

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707 Horsepower That Never Got to Show Its Hand

The Hellcat’s side of the story is more complicated than a single bad run suggests. Dodge’s supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi produced 707 horsepower straight from the factory in 2015, numbers that made it, at the time, one of the most powerful cars ever sold to the general public without a special order or a six-figure price tag. On this particular pass the Hellcat’s driver could not hook up cleanly off the line, spinning the rear tires and running a comparatively pedestrian 13.89 at 123.08 miles per hour. Crucially, the video’s own description notes that the same car had run a 10.87 at 127.79 miles per hour on drag radials just a week before, proof the Hellcat’s raw potential was never really in question.

The Week-Old Run That Changes Everything

That detail matters enormously to how the video should be understood, and the uploader makes a point of including it rather than editing it out, an unusually honest choice for a channel built around viral drag race clips. The Comet’s win in this specific pass was not really a referendum on which car is objectively faster; it was a demonstration of what happens when one driver executes a clean launch and the other does not, a lesson every drag racer eventually learns the hard way regardless of how many horsepower numbers are stamped on the window sticker.

An Unusually Honest Upload

Comments on the video split roughly evenly between celebrating the Comet’s old-school triumph and defending the Hellcat’s driver, a genuine back-and-forth that has continued for years since the original upload, with more than one commenter noting bluntly that “the pilot in the Hellcat doesn’t know how to drive,” while others point out the fundamental unfairness of comparing a purpose-tuned E85 street car against a bone-stock modern muscle car making its very first hard pass on premium pump gas. Both points have merit, and the tension between them is exactly why the comment section stays active years after the original upload.

The Comment Section Takes Sides

The Comet itself deserves attention on its own terms, separate from the Hellcat drama. Ford’s early-1960s Comet started life as a slightly upscale Falcon variant before growing into a genuine performance platform later in the decade, and finding one running a 429 Big Block Ford in 2015, built specifically for E85 street car competition, speaks to a corner of drag racing culture that prizes clever, budget-conscious builds over big-name factory muscle. The car’s understated looks, deliberately preserved rather than modernized, only add to the appeal when it starts winning races against machinery that costs many times more.

What Makes a 1962 Comet Worth Racing in the First Place

RT66 Test N Tune events like this one, run regularly at tracks across the country, occupy an important niche in grassroots drag racing, giving everyday racers a low-pressure venue to run their cars against a wide mix of machinery without the stakes or entry barriers of a sanctioned national event. It is exactly the kind of setting where a family-built E85 Comet and a brand-new factory Hellcat can end up staged next to each other in the first place, a matchup that would almost never happen at a more formal, class-structured competition where the two cars would likely never even meet on the same day.

Why Grassroots Test-and-Tune Events Make Matchups Like This Possible

The uploader closes the description with a wink, inviting “the controversy and haters” to begin in the comments, and years later, that invitation is still being accepted. What keeps the video alive is not really the outcome of one quarter mile pass but the larger argument it represents: old versus new, cubic inches versus forced induction, a family-built street car versus a factory-engineered supercar. Nobody watching walks away with a definitive answer, and that is exactly why the debate keeps drawing new viewers into the comments section years after the tree first dropped the light.

E85 as the Great Equalizer

Ethanol fuel plays a bigger role in this story than a casual viewer might assume. E85’s higher octane rating allows a built engine to run more aggressive ignition timing and higher compression than pump gas would safely permit, which is a major reason a 429-powered Comet running on the fuel can hang with, and briefly beat, a supercharged factory Hemi on premium unleaded. It is a common trick in grassroots drag and street car circles precisely because it lets builders extract serious power from an otherwise old-school naturally aspirated combination without resorting to forced induction or exotic fuel systems that would price a family-built project car out of reach entirely.

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