For five years the Shelby GT500 nameplate sat dormant while rivals kept shipping ever-more-powerful factory monsters. Then camouflaged prototypes started turning up at Virginia International Raceway wearing a roll cage and a leaked oil spec sheet that hinted at serious horsepower. Read on to find out what those spy photos gave away, and how the finished car compared to the speculation.
Posts Tagged: Hellcat
While six-figure Demon markups and Hellcat mania grabbed every headline, the Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack quietly kept doing nearly everything the halo cars do. This low-mileage example, which has already changed hands once, packs a genuine 485 horsepower from its naturally aspirated 6.4-liter 392 Hemi V8, all for less than 33,000. Read on to see why enthusiasts increasingly call the Scat Pack the smartest buy in the entire modern Challenger lineup.
Dodge’s 2017 Challenger SRT Hellcat hid a 707-horsepower supercharged HEMI under an ordinary-looking body, backed by a 650 lb-ft torque figure, a 199 mph top speed, and a 3.5-second sprint to 60. It even shipped with two different keys that changed how much power the car was willing to give you. Read on for the numbers, the rivals it outran, and what clean examples are worth on today’s collector market.
Chevrolet built the 2014-2015 Camaro Z/28 as a purpose-built track weapon, dropping the Corvette Z06’s 505-hp LS7 into a chassis reworked with spool-valve dampers, a wider front track, and massive brakes. Semi-slick Pirelli Trofeo R tires — a production-car first — gave it grip few pony cars could match. GM originally planned thousands of units but hand-built just 1,801 at its Performance Build Center, making this naturally aspirated homage to the original Z/28 one of the rarest, most track-focused Camaros ever sold.
DragTimes pits a 707-horsepower Challenger Hellcat against a Tesla Model S P100D at a StreetCarDrags.com event — the latest round in what the channel calls a rivalry that ‘won’t stop racing.’ One detail catches viewers off guard: the Tesla actually weighs more than the Hellcat, making its edge purely about how instantly electric torque arrives. Multi-angle GoPro coverage means nothing at the stripe goes unseen. Watch to see whether the V8 finally closes the gap.
A Dodge Demon, a Hellcat, and a new ZL1 line up against a ’69 Charger, a Nova, a Chevelle, a Shelby GT500, and a classic Mustang in this old-vs-new drag racing compilation, and the results split viewers right down the middle. One camp insists nothing beats old-school cool factor; the other concedes technology always wins in the end. A 1970 Chevelle SS 454 turns in a pass that neither side saw coming. Watch the full lineup face off.
Dodge never built a Challenger convertible on the assembly line, and for most of the Hellcat’s life the only way to get one involved shipping a brand-new car to a specialty shop in Florida and waiting. The Plum Crazy example that made the rounds started exactly that way. Years later Dodge made the arrangement official, quoting the conversion at $25,999 and routing cars straight from the factory to the shop. Read on to find out how a roofless 707-horsepower Challenger became a semi-official product.
Brian Makse takes the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Widebody out for a first drive built around one real question: does borrowing the Demon’s flared fenders actually make the Hellcat better, or just meaner-looking? Commenters overwhelmingly say Dodge finally got the Challenger’s proportions right — and at least one viewer credits this exact review with convincing them to buy one. Watch to see whether the width lives up to the hype.
A twin-turbo Mustang, a supercharged Hellcat, a BMW M6, and — improbably — a four-door Cadillac CTS-V all lined up on the same stretch of Mexican freeway for a night of unsanctioned street racing. Nearly two million viewers have tuned in since, and the comment section still can’t agree on which car actually deserved bragging rights. Watch to see which one earns the loudest reaction.
Two headline Challengers arrived in the same 2017 news cycle, and enthusiasts have been mixing them up ever since. The all-wheel-drive one was the Challenger GT, a Pentastar V6 coupe aimed at snow-belt buyers. The 840-horsepower one was the rear-drive SRT Demon that lifted its front wheels off the pavement and ran 9.65 at 140 mph. Here is what each car actually was, and why Dodge needed both at once.
For 2017, Dodge let R/T Scat Pack buyers order the Dynamics Package and walk away with forged 20-inch wheels and six-piston Brembo brakes pulled straight from the SRT 392 and Hellcat parts bin, all for $2,200. What Dodge would not share was the supercharger, and that decision was entirely deliberate. Here is what the package actually changed, what it left alone, and why it still matters on the used market.
A stock Dodge Hellcat’s factory tires look aggressive enough to pass for an aftermarket upgrade, but every size on every trim rolled off the assembly line exactly as Dodge specified it. From the original 2015 car’s 275/40ZR20s to the Super Stock’s massive 315-width rear tires, the rubber underneath a Hellcat does as much work as the supercharged Hemi on top of it. Read on to find out exactly how much of a Hellcat’s quarter-mile time comes down to what’s bolted to the wheels.
A stretch of Houston road became the unlikely battleground for an 840-horsepower Hellcat, a 1300-horsepower GT-R, a 1200-horsepower Trans Am, and a handful of boosted Ford Coyote Mustangs nobody expected to keep winning. Lone Star Street Racing’s cameras caught the results, and they did not follow the horsepower numbers on the thumbnail. Watch to see which platform actually backed up its bragging rights on the street.
Cornerstone Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram in Elk River, Minnesota gives a full walkaround of a brand-new 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, the factory drag car that needed its own legal reclassification just to leave the lot on street-legal drag radials. The video runs through the full 15-trim Challenger lineup surrounding it and the details — from the second PCM to the missing exterior badge — that made the Demon unlike anything Dodge had sold before. Watch to see what a genuine Demon allocation looked like in person.
Dodge’s 2016 Challenger SRT Hellcat paired a 707-horsepower supercharged V8 with an 11.2-second quarter mile and a factory fuel economy rating nobody expected it to hold onto. This is the story of what that power actually cost owners day to day, from tire wear to insurance premiums, and why the Hellcat era changed how every manufacturer building a pony car thought about horsepower. Read on to see how the numbers held up once the burnout ended.
