1,200 miles, in the rain, on track, in traffic, and to
buy groceries. What’s everyone afraid of
I’m flying. The apexes probably think I’m Dan Gurney. Up
over the rise, a blind turn, steady, steady, hold it and, “You should probably wave
those guys by,” said my instructor, and I sheepishly pulled to the side to let
the faster cars pass. It was my very first track day, and I was not exactly the
quickest driver in Group A—but it didn’t bother me much, because I had driven a
’14 SRT (now Dodge) Viper 500 miles to take the carousel at turn 6 of Sonoma
Raceway’s tricky road course, and I was totally snake-bit, loving every second
behind the wheel.
The standard SRT
Viper comes with Pirelli P Zeros; for our track day, Chrysler outfitted us with
the TA (Time Attack) edition Corsas. We had some left, so on the way home we
tried to remedy that.
The trip hadn’t begun with a lot of confidence. Perusing the
great wisdom of the Internet showed that every expert seemed to feel that the
Viper was some sort of four-wheeled, V10 tornado, capable of changing direction
without warning and wreaking destruction across a vast area. “Don’t accelerate
hard out of turns.” “Go super easy on the throttle.” The Viper was described as
“a brute,” “violent,” even “undriveable.” By the time I got behind the wheel, I
was expecting to be sliding upside-down and on fire within a few seconds of
pressing the start button.
The Dodge Viper
has a reputation as a hard-handling brute, but despite repeated attempts, we
failed to lose control.
I took a deep breath and pressed it anyway. Nothing scary
happened. I put the car in Reverse, sure that I’d soon be hurtling over a cliff.
The Viper slowly moved backward, visibility issues nullified by the back-up
camera that I kept forgetting to look at. I still didn’t hit anything. I
continued to not hit anything, not spin out, and not dislike the car the entire
time I had it.
What’s there to dislike? The Viper is 3,402 pounds of carbon
fiber, steel, and aluminum—there’s even some magnesium in the cowl—wrapped
around an 8.4L (that’s 512 ci) V10 producing 640 loud, mean horses. At the very
center of that crunchy shell is a chewy leather-wrapped cockpit, a six-speed
manual transmission, and the controls to enough torque that you can leave an
intersection in Fifth and barely notice. Aside from the fact that the shifter
ball is comically oversized, the interior is sexy and comfortable, and as I
looked for excuses to keep driving—“I’m just going to run out to the corner store
by way of the Malibu canyons, be back in six hours”—I couldn’t figure out why
the car has such a vicious reputation.
The Viper’s
aluminum V10 has more in common with the Chrysler small-block V8 than with the
truck engine it’s often associated with. “I think we shared, like, one bolt
with the Truck V10,” Chief Viper Powertrain Engineer Dick Winkles told us. Back
in ’92, the Viper blew minds with 488 ci (7.99L) and 400 hp. Over the years,
the V10 has gained inches, horsepower, torque, and technology. The current
iteration boasts 512ci (8.4L), 640 hp, and 600 lb-ft of torque. Winkles says
the big numbers and easy street driving is possible due to changes in weight,
airflow, exhaust, and ignition. Keeping it capable of passing emissions has
been a big challenge, one that led to the ’08 Viper being the first production
car to use cam-incam VVT technology, which changes the exhaust valve timing to
reduce dilution in the cylinder at low rpm.
Convinced I was doing something wrong—perhaps one needs a certain
level of driving skill before one can hate the Viper—I invited Kevin Wesley, an
experienced rally, road-course, and autocross driver, to join me for a roadtrip
and track day in the Dodge. I picked him up at the airport, where a young pilot
shouted across the terminal that if I’d let him drive the car he’d let me fly
the plane. His passengers can thank their lucky stars that I was too busy
trying to fit Kevin’s luggage in the trunk to take him up on the offer. That,
by the way, is not a knock on the Viper’s cargo space, which although small, is
perfectly acceptable. Kevin packs like Mariah Carey going on tour.
Adjustable
leather-wrapped racing buckets are pretty comfortable, foolishly oversized
shifter ball is not. Parking-brake handle in the fun position sorta makes up
for it.
Our goal was Sonoma Raceway in northern California, 498
miles from our starting point in Los Angeles. We could have easily made it in a
half day on the interstate with the Viper’s effortless horsepower and 3.55
gearing, but that’s not a roadtrip. (Plus, I couldn’t afford the speeding
tickets.) We mapped out a twisty route through the Los Padres National Forest
instead, and after a wrong turn that allowed us to test the Viper’s off-road
capabilities as I inched it back around on a very narrow, slanted, unpaved
cliffside—it did great, expect to see it out at next year’s Easter Jeep
Safari—we finally ended up on an empty, curving two-lane road. “This road is
amazing,” Kevin said wistfully and repeatedly, until I got the hint and let him
take a turn behind the wheel. Then he kept saying it, but much more cheerfully.
Our forested twisties eventually dropped us down on State
Route 166, a straight, two-lane road that ends at U.S. 101. After the freedom
of the morning, the traffic and semitrucks on the highway felt like chains
around our ankles. If we were going to sit in traffic, we might as well have a
view of the ocean, and with that in mind, I took an exit for Hearst Castle and
State Route 1. Built in 1934, SR 1 is a sort of beautiful torture for a driver
in a fast, capable car. The views are exquisite, running alongside the Pacific
Ocean, which presents shades of blue that might make you join Greenpeace, if
they wouldn’t reject you because you showed up at the meeting in a 13-mpg
Viper. Where the road veers away from the ocean it threads up through redwoods
and over some of the most elegant bridges in the state, but all that prettiness
attracts the masses, and the masses cannot seem to drive around corners at even
the most conservative of posted speed limits. We quenched our impatience in
numerous stops at scenic turnouts. While Kevin photographed sea lions and
whitecaps, I turned back to the Viper. Never once did we pull off without
someone else stopping alongside us, not to share our wonder at the glories of
the sea, but to take advantage of the Viper’s photogenic good looks. Every stop
brought the same interactions: “That car is awesome,” followed by, “What is
it?” We found that question somewhat baffling, since the Viper has been around
since ’92, and although its horsepower has gone up from 400 to 640, and its
brakes, body, interior, and electronics have all been upgraded over the years,
it has retained the same basic power plant, that manually shifted big ol’ V10,
and recognizable shape—long hood, double bubble roof, more scoops and slots
than a cheese grater. Perhaps the cause of the Viper’s rumored poor sales is
not that nobody wants it, but that nobody knows what it is and what it can do.
Every scoop, indent,
and duct on the Viper is fully functional—from air intakes to brake and
differential cooling.
Certainly anyone who does know is gonna want it. We put it
in as many difficult driving situations as we could think of, and it never once
disappointed us. San Francisco’s potholed streets didn’t rip any dangly bits
off, nor could that city’s clutch-eating hills discourage us, although we
developed an affection for the hill-start function that we’d previously been
mocking as unnecessary. Some folks disparage the sound of the 10-cylinder, but
those people are wrong. The Viper ought to come with a GPS program that sends
you through as many tunnels as possible and automatically rolls the windows
down as you blast through.
On the track, the Viper was just as delightful as it was in
the tunnels. I’d had several people tell me it was a terrible car to take for a
first track day, but that wasn’t my experience at all. I loved the way it felt
solidly planted, yet gave me enough feedback to understand what the instructor
was telling me to do. When he told me to stay in it, to turn in tight, to drift
wide, to brake late, the car responded to each of my improvements, sticking in
the turns and skimming the rises and curbs. When I messed up, it warned me, but
it never once did anything I couldn’t fix. The clutch was easy, the shifter
clunky but not sloppy, and the throttle pedal totally exhilarating.
I was feeling pretty enamored, but I hadn’t really pushed
it. Perhaps it didn’t show its nasty side to track sissies like me. I went out
as a passenger with Kevin in the advanced class. He turned off all the
electronic nannies, and I lost count of how many times we lapped the field of
Ferraris, McLarens, and GTRs.
Does your car have
the Nürburgring embossed in the door pull? Did it lap that track in 7:12.13, as
the Viper ACR did? Bragging rights
“I loved it, absolutely loved it,” he said when we came in.
“It takes lots of driver involvement, but it’s comfortable. The car did nothing
scary, it went where it was pointed. I expected something frightening. The car
is so far from scary… It was very well balanced.“
We pondered the fate of the Viper as we drove home the next
day. It’s a sort of outlier in its class. Its low-slung, two-seater
configuration and six-figure price tag should mark it as a sports car, but
sports cars today are so delicate and refined. “Sporty” becomes a misnomer for
something that doesn’t occasionally make you sweat. If you can find one with a
manual transmission, it’s hooked up to numerous electronics to make you seem
like you know how to rev-match, to keep you from being able to stall out at
Cars and Coffee. Modern sports cars are such suck-ups. The Viper may not
actively be trying to kill you, but if you’re stupid, it won’t save you either.
The Viper doesn’t
claim great gas mileage, and we certainly spent some time wrestling with the
gas pumps on our trip, but we still managed to come home with an average of 17
mpg—and that’s including the full-throttle, on-track usage, where we dropped to
single digits. Low single digits
The same lack of bells and whistles keep the Viper from
supercar status, despite being capable of top speeds of more than 200 mph, and
Nürburgring lap times so quick you couldn’t even microwave a frozen dinner
before it completed the circuit. Supercars are upholstered in gold-threaded
silk and unborn baby deer skin. They have rear wings controlled by
nano-technology, or the brainwaves of German engineers. The only brain
controlling the Viper is yours.
So let’s see: huge, unexpected engine in an
attention-getting body, capable of beating both purpose-built race cars and
much more expensive exotics, all while frightening mainstream automotive
journalists and delighting enthusiasts. Kinda sounds like a hot rod.
