The Internal Codename For the Dodge Demon’s Engine Was “Benny”

SRT had a naming convention for its most powerful V8s, and it involved fighter planes. Then the small team developing the Challenger SRT Demon needed something quieter, and the 840-horsepower engine ended up named after a round blue cat from a 1961 Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The name stuck through years of secret development and it is still what insiders call the engine. Read on for the story and what Benny actually became.

Detroit has rules about this sort of thing, even if nobody writes them down. When an engineering team builds a weapon, the weapon gets a weapon’s name. SRT had already worked its way through a fighter-plane naming convention, and the pattern held right up until the moment a small, secretive group started developing the most violent engine Chrysler would ever sell to the public. Then somebody picked a name that sounded like a golden retriever. It stayed that way through years of dyno pulls and locked-door meetings, and the engineers who built the thing still use it. The reason behind that name says more about the Demon program than any horsepower figure does.

The Fighter-Plane Naming Convention SRT Abandoned

SRT had a habit worth respecting. The naturally aspirated 392 cubic-inch HEMI carried the internal codename “Apache,” borrowed from military aviation. When the supercharged 6.2-liter arrived in 2015 making 707 horsepower, it was called “Hellcat” internally long before anyone stuck the badge on a fender, a reference to the Grumman F6F Hellcat carrier fighter of the Second World War. The convention was consistent and it was intentional, because a name that sounds like ordnance sets expectations inside a company just as much as it does outside one. Anyone reading an internal document about an engine called Hellcat understood immediately what kind of project they were looking at, which was precisely the problem when SRT started work on the next one.

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A Blue Cat From a 1961 Cartoon

The engine that became the Demon’s was codenamed “Benny,” and the story behind it runs through Chris Cowland, SRT’s director of advanced and SRT powertrain engineering. Cowland grew up in Britain watching Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat, which aired there under the title Boss Cat, and one of the gang in that 1961 cartoon was Benny the Ball, a small, round, permanently cheerful blue cat. Cowland reportedly liked that the Demon’s engine block was going to be painted a similar shade, and the association stuck. Allpar first reported the detail, and it has been repeated by engineers on the program since. It is a genuinely odd origin for the most powerful production V8 an American manufacturer had ever built.

Why a Boring Name Was Actually the Point

The choice was not just whimsy. The Demon was developed by a deliberately small team under real secrecy, and a name that telegraphed intent was a liability. An internal requisition for parts destined for a program called “Hellcat 2” or something similarly aggressive invites questions from every department it passes through. A requisition for “Benny” does not. The same logic explains why Dodge ran an eleven-week teaser campaign in 2017 rather than a conventional reveal, and why the car’s headline specifications were withheld until the New York Auto Show. Camouflage in the engineering department is cheaper than camouflage on a prototype, and a deliberately unremarkable codename is about as cheap as camouflage gets.

What Benny Actually Became: 840 Horsepower

What Benny turned into is worth restating, because the numbers still look implausible. On 100-plus octane race fuel with the Demon’s supplied powertrain control module, the 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI produced 840 horsepower and 770 lb-ft of torque. On ordinary 91-octane pump gas it made 808 horsepower and 717 lb-ft, which by itself would have been a record for a factory muscle car. Redline moved to 6,500 rpm, up from the Hellcat’s 6,200. Every one of those figures came out of an engine that shared its bore centers and basic architecture with the pushrod HEMI that had been in Chrysler products since 2003, which is a reminder of how much headroom the design still had.

The Supercharger That Made the Difference

The single biggest change was the blower. The Hellcat used a 2.4-liter twin-screw supercharger running roughly 11.6 psi. The Demon got a 2.7-liter unit spinning to 25,000 rpm and pushing about 14.5 psi, a roughly 12.5 percent jump in displacement that still required a taller hood bulge and a great deal more cooling capacity to survive. Dodge answered that with the SRT Power Chiller, which reroutes the air conditioning refrigerant through the supercharger’s charge cooler to drop intake air temperature before a run, and an After-Run Chiller that keeps coolant and the low-temperature circuit moving after shutdown. The Air-Grabber hood scoop feeding the whole system measured 45.2 square inches, the largest functional hood scoop ever fitted to a production car.

Three Seconds of Setup Before the Launch

None of that mattered without a way to launch. The Demon introduced the first TransBrake ever offered on a production vehicle, a system that locks the output shaft of the eight-speed automatic so the driver can build engine speed to roughly 2,350 rpm against a dead stop and then release it through a paddle. Torque Reserve worked alongside it, closing the supercharger bypass valve and cutting fuel to selected cylinders so boost was already standing by when the brake let go. Combined with launch assist, which monitors driveshaft speed for wheel hop and momentarily reduces torque when it detects it, the car could put down a launch that street tires would have simply vaporized.

A Production Car That Pulled the Front Wheels Off the Ground

So Dodge did not fit street tires. The Demon shipped on Nitto NT05R street-legal drag radials in 315/40R18, the first factory car ever delivered on drag radials, with narrower front runners available as part of the optional Demon Crate. The result was an NHRA-certified quarter mile of 9.65 seconds at 140 mph, 0 to 60 mph in 2.3 seconds, and a launch that generated 1.8 g and lifted the front wheels 2.92 feet off the pavement, a figure Guinness World Records recognized as the longest wheelie from a standing start by a production car. The NHRA then banned it from sanctioned competition without a roll cage, which Dodge treated as marketing.

Only 3,300 People Ever Got One

Production was capped at 3,300 units, 3,000 for the United States and 300 for Canada, built for the 2018 model year only. Base price was $84,995, a figure that already absorbed the $1,700 gas guzzler tax and left only the destination charge to add on top, and the Demon Crate, which included the drag wheels and tires, a floor jack, a torque wrench, the high-octane PCM, and various delete parts, cost exactly one dollar. Buyers who took the crate got a serialized identity attached to their car. Values held far better than most limited-run Mopars, and clean low-mileage examples have traded well above original sticker for years, which is unusual for a car that was built specifically to be abused at a drag strip.

Why the Codename Outlived the Car

The codename is the part that keeps getting retold, and there is a reason for that. Benny is a small, harmless-sounding word attached to the most extreme thing Chrysler ever put a warranty on, and that gap is genuinely funny in an industry that usually takes itself seriously. It is also a small window into how the Demon happened at all: a compact team, working quietly, deliberately avoiding attention until the car was finished enough to survive contact with the public. The fighter-plane names came back afterward, but for the length of that program the most fearsome engine in Detroit answered to a cartoon cat.

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