Upss! He didn’t see it coming -2017 Camaro SS vs Scat Pack Charger drag race

A 2017 Camaro SS and a brand-new Dodge Charger Scat Pack lined up for a straight-line grudge match that should have come down to horsepower. Instead, it turned into a lesson about factory tire widths that muscle car owners are still citing years later. The comment section didn’t blame the driver – they blamed Dodge. Watch to see exactly where it went wrong.

Every muscle car rivalry has a moment fans point to as proof of something. This one was supposed to be about which factory V8 pulls harder off the line – a sixth-generation Camaro SS against a brand-new Dodge Charger Scat Pack, both fresh off the showroom floor. Instead, it became a different kind of lesson entirely, one that has almost nothing to do with which engine is stronger and everything to do with what Dodge bolted to the back of the car. The footage is short. The argument it started in the comments has lasted years.

Two New-School Muscle Cars, One Christmas Tree

By 2017, both of these cars represented their brand’s mainstream muscle-car answer to the horsepower wars reignited by the Hellcat era. The Camaro SS carried GM’s naturally aspirated 6.2-liter LT1, the same small-block architecture (with different tuning) found under the hood of the C7 Corvette, rated at 455 horsepower. The Dodge Charger Scat Pack, meanwhile, represented Chrysler’s mid-tier muscle sedan – a four-door with a 6.4-liter 392 Hemi rated at 485 horsepower and 475 lb-ft of torque, positioned as the affordable step below the supercharged Hellcat. On paper, more torque and more horsepower should have made the Charger the clear favorite in a straight-line fight.

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What Actually Happened at the Tree

It didn’t play out that way. As the video’s own title admits with a wince – Upss! He didn’t see it coming – the Charger driver lost the run almost entirely to wheelspin, watching the Camaro pull away cleanly while the Scat Pack fought for traction instead of putting power to the ground. It’s not a crash, and nobody gets hurt, but it’s the kind of launch every muscle car owner dreads: full throttle, and the rear tires simply can’t keep up with what the engine is trying to do.

The Internet’s Verdict: Blame the Tires

The comment section didn’t spend much time debating engines – it went straight after Dodge’s factory tire choice. Commenter after commenter pointed to the same number: 245-millimeter-wide rear tires trying to manage 485 horsepower and 475 lb-ft of torque, a mismatch multiple viewers called out by name as the actual cause of the spin, not driver error. One comment summed up the sentiment shared across dozens of replies: a car with this much torque simply has no business leaving the factory on rubber that width, and Dodge – not the driver – bears the blame for what happened at the line.

A Recurring Complaint, Not a One-Off

What makes this video worth revisiting is how consistently that same criticism has followed the Scat Pack platform since launch. Enthusiast forums and drag strip regulars have long noted that the 392 Hemi’s torque curve overwhelms its stock tire width far more easily than rival muscle cars with comparable output, especially in cooler weather or on a strip with a green, unprepped surface – exactly the conditions a driver less experienced with the car’s launch behavior can get caught out by. It’s become such a known quirk of the platform that get wider tires first is near-universal advice for new Scat Pack owners heading to their first test-and-tune night.

What a Clean Launch Actually Looks Like

When a Scat Pack Charger does hook up properly – typically on drag radials rather than the factory all-season rubber, or with careful traction-control management – quarter-mile times in the low-to-mid 12-second range at over 115 mph are well within reach, numbers that would comfortably outrun this Camaro SS in a fair fight. That’s part of what makes this clip land the way it does: it’s not proof the Charger is slower, it’s proof of exactly how much stock tires can cost a driver who doesn’t respect how much torque is sitting under their right foot.

The Camaro’s Quieter Advantage

While the Charger commanded most of the comment section’s attention, the Camaro’s win says something about its own chassis tuning too. The LT1-powered SS has generally been regarded as the more forgiving car to launch hard from a standing start, in part because its lower factory horsepower and torque figures put less immediate strain on its rear contact patch, and in part because GM tuned its traction and stability systems around aggressive street and strip use from the outset. It’s a smaller number on the spec sheet translating into an easier car to actually drive fast.

Why This Rivalry Never Gets Old

Camaro-versus-Charger has been one of the defining modern muscle car arguments for over a decade, and this specific matchup captures why it refuses to resolve cleanly: neither car wins every category, and the winner of any given run depends as much on tires, surface, and driver as it does on horsepower figures. That ambiguity is exactly what keeps clips like this one circulating years after they’re filmed – there’s always another variable for the losing side to point to.

The Real Lesson for New Owners

Buried under the jokes in the comment section is genuinely useful advice for anyone shopping for a factory-torque-heavy muscle car: know what your tires can and can’t handle before you find out at a green light or a test-and-tune. This Charger driver’s mistake wasn’t underestimating the competition – it was overestimating a 245-width tire’s ability to manage 475 lb-ft of torque, a lesson plenty of Scat Pack and Hellcat owners have learned the same expensive way.

The Bigger Tire Arms Race

This isn’t a problem unique to the Scat Pack – it’s a symptom of an entire era where domestic manufacturers kept adding torque faster than they were willing to widen the tires that came standard on the car. The supercharged Hellcat models that sit above the Scat Pack in Dodge’s lineup famously shipped with a Track Pack widening the stock tire to help manage even more torque, an acknowledgment from Dodge itself that the base setup wasn’t enough once power climbed past a certain threshold. Owners who buy into this segment quickly learn that the factory spec sheet is really just a starting point, not a finished product, if they intend to launch hard on a regular basis.

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