Dodge Demon vs McLaren 720S Roll Racing – 2 Races

DragTimes lines up a Dodge Demon running in street trim, all seats in, 93-octane pump gas, against a McLaren 720S for two roll races. Strip away the Demon’s drag-prepped extras and the fight gets a lot more honest than the spec sheet suggests. It is exactly the kind of factory-versus-supercar matchup Dodge had in mind when it built the Demon in the first place. Watch to see which advantage actually wins the day.

A Dodge Demon built for 9-second quarter-miles rarely leaves the strip in factory drag trim — full seats installed, street tires mounted, running on nothing more exotic than 93-octane pump gas. That is exactly the version DragTimes lined up against a McLaren 720S for this roll race, and the choice is the whole story. Strip away the Demon’s purpose-built drag configuration and what is left is a car that still has to answer for itself against a supercar built from the ground up to do one thing: go very, very fast in a straight line. Drone footage tracks both cars from launch to top-end, and the gap that opens, or does not, says more about factory engineering than any spec sheet could.

Street Trim Changes Everything

The Dodge Demon’s headline number, 840 horsepower, only shows up when the car is running the Demon Crate’s dedicated fuel and stripped of its rear seat, spare tire, and passenger seat, all optional deletions built into the ordering process specifically to shave weight for the drag strip. Running on 93-octane pump gas with every seat bolted back in, as it is here, the supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8 is closer to 808 horsepower, still enormous, but a meaningful step down from the car’s maximum drag-prepped potential, and a fairer real-world comparison to a car most owners will never actually crate-race.

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What the McLaren Brings to the Fight

The 720S counters with a twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V8 making 710 horsepower, wrapped in a carbon-fiber tub that keeps the car’s curb weight well under the Demon’s. McLaren’s official 0-60 figure sits at 2.7 seconds, achieved not through outright horsepower but through a power-to-weight ratio that a body-on-frame muscle car, no matter how hard Dodge worked the supercharger, was never going to match on paper alone.

Two Races, Two Different Stories

DragTimes ran the pair twice, and roll races have a way of exposing exactly where each car’s strengths live — a rolling start favors whichever car can convert torque into forward motion the instant the throttle opens, rather than whichever car wins the reaction-time game at a dig. The two-run format also cancels out some of the luck of a single pass, giving a clearer picture of which car actually has the edge once both are already moving.

The Demon’s Real Rival Was Never the 720S

Dodge built the Demon to hunt exotic supercars on paper and then, more pointedly, to embarrass them on a drag strip; Dodge’s own marketing at launch specifically called out cars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis as the benchmark, not other muscle cars. Matching a McLaren in a street-legal package, on pump gas, with all the seats still in the car, is close to the exact scenario Dodge’s engineers had in mind when they greenlit the program.

Why Roll Races Like This Keep Drawing Views

Channels built around this kind of matchup, DragTimes included, thrive because the outcome is never fully predictable until the cars are actually side by side; spec-sheet racing and real racing routinely disagree, and a factory Hemi against a carbon-fiber supercar is exactly the kind of pairing that keeps that argument alive. It also removes the ambiguity that heavily modified grudge-race content often invites, since two mostly stock, street-legal cars settle the question directly.

Two Very Different Value Trajectories

Dodge only built the Demon for a single model year before retiring the name, and that limited run has pushed collector values steadily upward since, with well-optioned, low-mileage examples now commanding well over sticker at auction. The 720S has followed the opposite curve, depreciating the way most exotic supercars do once the newest model takes its place in McLaren’s lineup, which makes this particular matchup an odd snapshot: an appreciating American icon against a car quietly losing value in real time, both still capable of humbling the other in a straight line.

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