The Fastest Scat Packs & Hellcats Anywhere Will Race Here!

Muscle At The Strip, formerly Mopars At The Strip, brought the Mopar Muscle Scat Pack Challenge and Hellcat Shootout to The Strip At Las Vegas on April 21 through 23, 2017, splitting the field between 392 Apache Hemi cars and 707-horsepower supercharged Hellcats. Both brackets went to manual-transmission cars, an upset in classes the eight-speed automatics usually dominate. Read on to find out how the stick shifts pulled it off.

Every April, a certain kind of Dodge owner packs a helmet next to the polish and heads for Las Vegas with a score to settle. The show-and-shine is fine, the swap meet is useful, but the reason they drove across the desert is the timing tower at the strip. Two brackets at the 2017 Muscle At The Strip weekend, April 21 through 23, were built for exactly that argument: one for the 392 Apache Hemi cars, one for the 707-horsepower supercharged Hellcats. Every entrant left the factory with more power than most owners dreamed of a decade ago, so the question in the staging lanes was not who had the most, but who could use it.

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From Mopars At The Strip to Muscle At The Strip

For years the event ran as Mopars At The Strip, a Mopar-only pilgrimage to The Strip At Las Vegas where owners could show, shop, swap, and race in one weekend. By 2017 it had been rechristened Muscle At The Strip, a change made deliberately so the MATS acronym survived. The rename acknowledged what the crowd had already become: a broader muscle car gathering that still revolved around Chrysler products but no longer turned anyone away at the gate. The core formula of a proper drag strip, a big car show, and a swap meet did not change at all.

Two Brackets, Two Engines

Mopar Muscle magazine put its name on the two headline contests, the Scat Pack Challenge and the Hellcat Shootout. The split is by engine. Scat Pack cars run the 392-cubic-inch Apache Hemi, a naturally aspirated big-inch V8, while the Hellcat class is reserved for the 6.2-liter supercharged Hemi rated at 707 horsepower. Keeping them separate matters, because a supercharged car with a couple hundred more horsepower would otherwise turn the Scat Pack bracket into a warm-up act. Each class gets its own ladder, its own eliminations, and its own winner.

What a 392 Scat Pack Brings

The 392 Scat Pack is the value proposition of modern Mopar performance: a large-displacement Hemi with factory power that would have made it the fastest car in nearly any showroom of the classic era, wrapped in a Challenger or Charger body that leans hard on 1970 styling. In a bracket full of near-identical cars, the differences come down to tires, launch technique, and how well the driver manages a heavy car on a prepped surface. That makes the Scat Pack Challenge a driver’s contest more than an equipment race, and the results usually reflect it.

The Hellcat Problem

The Hellcat’s challenge at the strip is the same thing that makes it famous: 707 horsepower through the rear tires of a big coupe or sedan. Putting that down cleanly from a standing start requires drag radials, careful launch control, and restraint on the throttle in the first sixty feet. Plenty of Hellcat owners discover at their first event that a stock car on street tires spins where a well-driven Scat Pack hooks. The Hellcat Shootout rewards the owners who have done the homework on tires and technique rather than the ones who simply bought the biggest number.

The Year the Stick Shifts Won

The 2017 running produced a result worth remembering. Both the Hellcat Shootout and the Scat Pack Challenge went to manual-transmission cars. The overwhelming majority of Scat Pack and Hellcat buyers take the eight-speed automatic, which shifts faster and more consistently than any human, and it is generally the quicker choice at the strip. A driver winning with the six-speed has to nail every launch and every shift under pressure, in a car that is easier to over-rev or bog. Two stick-shift wins in one weekend is an underdog story in a class most people assume the automatics own.

Why the Automatic Usually Wins

Modern eight-speed automatics in these cars are engineered for exactly this task. Launch control manages wheelspin, shifts happen in fractions of a second with no lift, and there is no clutch to slip or miss. On a prepped strip, an automatic Hellcat driver mostly needs to hold the brake, floor it, and steer. That is why a manual victory carries weight. The manual driver gave up measurable time at every gear change and won anyway, which says a great deal about the gap between a car’s potential and a driver’s ability to extract it.

Vegas as the Mopar Capital in April

The Strip At Las Vegas is part of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway complex, and its wide, well-prepped surface and long shutdown make it a natural home for a weekend of factory-fast street cars. The dry spring air helps too. Owners drive in from California, Arizona, Utah, and well beyond, and the parking lots become their own show as much as the judged field. For a Mopar fan, walking the rows of Challengers, Chargers, Cudas, and Darts before the racing even starts is half the value of the trip.

Show, Shop, Swap, Race

What separates MATS from a one-day drag event is that the racing is only one pillar. The car show draws restored classics alongside the modern Hemi cars, the vendor midway brings parts companies that specialize in Mopar, and the swap meet is where owners of E-bodies and B-bodies hunt for the trim piece they have been missing for years. A weekend that lets you watch a Hellcat run, buy a grille for a 1970 Cuda, and race your own car on Sunday is a rare combination in the hobby.

A New Chapter for Factory Drag Racing

Contests like the Scat Pack Challenge and Hellcat Shootout are the modern echo of the factory-backed Super Stock era, when Chrysler built cars specifically to win on Saturday and sell on Monday. The difference is that today’s owners do not need a race-only package; the showroom car is already the weapon. That is why events built around stock-class competition have grown alongside the cars. The manufacturer builds the horsepower, the event supplies the track, and the owners supply the bragging rights.

Bragging Rights, Settled Properly

Bench racing in a parking lot never settled anything. Muscle At The Strip exists so that a Scat Pack owner who insists his car is the fastest in three states can prove it against a full ladder of identical machines, and so that Hellcat owners can find out whether the 707-horsepower number means much without the driving to match. In 2017 the answer came from two manual-transmission drivers who out-executed the field. Whatever the marquee says, MATS is still where Mopar arguments go to be ended.

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