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MotorWeek’s John Davis takes Dodge’s 840-horsepower Challenger SRT Demon to the one place it was actually built for — a drag strip — and comes away with a Guinness World Record-setting wheelie on camera. Commenters call it a milestone episode, tracing Davis’s career all the way back to a very different MotorWeek review: a 1992 Pontiac Firehawk once described as “barely street legal” with 340 horsepower.
MotorWeek’s John Davis takes the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon straight to a drag strip, testing a car SRT engineered from the ground up rather than simply retuning the Hellcat it’s often mistaken for. Four decades into hosting the show, Davis treats it as a milestone episode, and the comments make clear plenty of longtime viewers agree. It’s a car built almost entirely around one number. Watch to see what that number actually is.
Dodge unveiled the Challenger SRT Demon with a supercharged Hemi V8 rated at 840 horsepower, factory-fitted wide-body fender flares, and a production run capped at just 3,300 units total. The reveal landed alongside news that Ford was extending availability of its own Shelby Mustangs, giving performance buyers two big storylines at once. Both moves capped a mid-2010s horsepower race that pushed Dodge, Ford, and Chevrolet to repeatedly one-up each other. Read on to find out which of these limited-run factory monsters will matter more to collectors decades from now.
Nearly every car built has air conditioning to keep the people inside comfortable. Dodge found a way to steal that system and point it at the engine instead. The SRT Power Chiller on the Challenger SRT Demon redirected the cabin’s refrigerant to cool the air charge before a run down the strip, a factory-production first that Dodge teased ahead of the 2017 New York Auto Show. Read on to find out how it worked and what it made possible.