The Muscle Cars of the 2017 New York Auto Show

The 2017 New York International Auto Show had plenty of new metal on the floor, but one car made everything around it look conservative. Dodge brought a production Challenger engineered almost entirely around a single number on a drag strip timeslip, and it was willing to delete parts of the interior to get there. Read on to find out what Dodge actually built, and why the NHRA banned it before anyone bought one.

Most auto show reveals are exercises in incremental improvement. A new grille, a revised interior, a modest bump in output, and a press release full of adjectives. The 2017 New York International Auto Show had all of that, and then Dodge rolled something onto the floor that made the rest of the hall look like it was competing in a different sport entirely. The car was built around a single objective, and Dodge had been willing to remove standard equipment, redesign the suspension, and fit hardware borrowed from purpose-built race cars to achieve it. The most remarkable part was not the horsepower figure. It was that any manufacturer signed off on selling this to the public at all.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

← Prev Next →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Reveal That Made an Entire Show Look Cautious

Dodge had spent months engineering the anticipation as carefully as it engineered the car. Rather than saving everything for the show floor, the company released a long run of short teaser videos in the weeks beforehand, each revealing a single specification or capability without assembling the full picture. Enthusiast forums picked apart every frame, arguing over what the fragments implied, and the campaign kept the car in the conversation for far longer than a conventional reveal would have. By the time the covers actually came off in New York, the audience had already been primed to expect something extreme, and the reveal still exceeded what most people had guessed. That is difficult to pull off. Teaser campaigns usually inflate expectations past what the product can satisfy, and the resulting disappointment does more damage than silence would have. In this case the hardware was genuinely strange enough to survive the buildup, which is why the reveal dominated coverage of an auto show that had a great deal of other new metal on the floor.

Nine-Second Numbers From a Dealership Car

The headline numbers set the tone. The 2018 Challenger SRT Demon produced 840 horsepower when running on race fuel, launched to sixty miles per hour in 2.3 seconds, and ran the quarter-mile in under ten seconds. Those figures belonged to hypercars costing many multiples of the Demon’s price, and only a few years earlier the idea of a factory muscle car posting them would have been dismissed as fantasy. It was the first production car sold through ordinary dealerships to put up that kind of performance on a drag strip.

Drag Radials on All Four Corners

Fitting tires capable of handling that output required rebuilding the car’s proportions. Dodge added factory fender flares that widened the Demon by 3.5 inches over a standard Challenger, creating room for 18-by-11-inch wheels wrapped in Demon-specific 315/40R18 Nitto NT05R drag radials at all four corners. Drag radials on the front axle of a production car were essentially unheard of, and they exist because a car launching this hard needs the front tires to survive the moment the nose comes up rather than simply steer.

The Biggest Functional Hood Scoop Ever Fitted

Feeding the supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi is the Air Grabber hood scoop, the largest functional hood scoop ever fitted to a production car. It is sealed and ducted straight into an enlarged airbox, forcing cold air into the engine rather than letting it draw from under the hood. Dodge paired that with an air-conditioning system that could be redirected to chill the intake charge before a run, which is the kind of solution a drag racing team develops rather than something that emerges from a normal production engineering process.

A Transmission Brake From the Factory

Then there is the transmission brake, the first ever fitted to a production car. A transbrake locks the driveline so the engine can build revs and boost against a stationary car, then releases everything at once for a launch that a torque converter alone could never produce. This is core drag racing hardware, the sort of thing that normally arrives in a box from a specialist supplier and gets installed by someone who races for a living. Dodge fitted it at the factory and warranted it.

The Seats Dodge Charged One Dollar to Put Back

The weight reduction program is where the car’s priorities become impossible to misread. The standard configuration deletes the front passenger seat, the rear seat, and a long list of components, with buyers able to add the missing seats back for a token one-dollar charge each. Manufacturers do not usually remove equipment customers have already paid for. Dodge did it because every pound removed showed up on the timeslip, and the timeslip was the entire point of the exercise.

Almost Three Feet of Air on Launch

The car also collected a Guinness World Record for the longest front-wheel lift by a production vehicle, getting its front tires 2.92 feet off the ground on launch. That record is a consequence of the suspension calibration, which was tuned to transfer weight rearward aggressively rather than to keep the car planted. It looks like a stunt in photographs. It is actually a byproduct of engineering the launch for maximum rear tire loading, and it produced one of the most reproduced automotive images of the decade.

Certified at 9.65 and Banned for It

The NHRA’s response completed the story. The sanctioning body certified the Demon at 9.65 seconds and 140.09 miles per hour, then declined to allow it to compete in stock classes without a roll cage and additional safety equipment, because cars running quicker than ten seconds require them. A production car banned from drag racing for being too fast is a marketing achievement no advertising agency could have manufactured, and Dodge understood exactly what it had. Production was limited to 3,300 cars total, split between the United States and Canada.

What the Demon Looks Like in Hindsight

Seen from today, the Demon reads as the high-water mark of a specific moment. The Challenger platform it was built on has since gone out of production, and the internal-combustion muscle car segment has narrowed considerably. Values for well-kept, low-mileage examples have held up accordingly, and the cars with complete documentation and an unused Demon Crate command the strongest interest. Whatever else the 2017 New York show produced, it introduced the car that most clearly marked the end of an era, and it did so by being almost absurdly good at one very specific thing.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Related posts:

2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon Specs, Price: Muscle Car Claims Title of Most Powerful Production Vehicle 1966 Dodge Charger Spends 40 Years in Storage! 2018 Chevy Chevelle release date specifications and price !! CAN THIS BE REAL!?!?!?! Closer Look at an Engine Chevrolet C10 Rat Truck 550HP Sleeper Rat Rod Buick Gran Sport 1969 400 Stage 1 Muscle Car Memes: Fuel efficiency is not cool… Muscle Car Memes: Look Son…. 2017 Dodge Challenger GT: Strongest Muscle in America The Dodge Demon hype machine is fueled by online enthusiasts