Describe the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon to anyone who doesn’t already know what it is, and they’ll likely ask how such a vehicle could possibly be offered for public consumption. It’s set up primarily for drag racing, produces 808 horsepower on premium gas and 840 horses on 100 octane, and comes with a seat only for the driver. Sold to the same litigious American public that fosters warning labels on everything from bean sprouts to pool toys, the Demon seems like a rolling lawsuit-in-waiting. So how on earth did Fiat Chrysler’s SRT performance group convince the company’s top brass to build the car? And once it did, how was it able to keep key program details a total secret—even possibly from some of those same bosses—until the Demon’s public debut?
A Straight-Line Project Takes a Left Turn
The first Demon seeds were sown in 2015, when SRT pitched a street-legal drag racer based on the Challenger—the ADR, for “American Drag Racer”—to the FCA product-planning committee. According to SRT head Tim Kuniskis, that group and CEO Sergio Marchionne deemed the initial project objectives “crazy.” We should point out that the project’s objectives were far less insane than the Demon’s eventual performance capability. Dodge simply had hoped the ADR would be a roughly 10-second muscle car, a “Hellcat Plus.”
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It wasn’t going to get the guy next door driving a Camry to go, ‘Holy shit, is that a Demon?’
—SRT’s Tim Kuniskis on early performance objectives
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After execs were assured that the ADR would be street legal and continue the Hellcat’s work in reinforcing Dodge’s performance chops, SRT was given a preliminary green light in April 2015 to explore production. Six months later, FCA gave the project a full go-ahead, although by then the SRT team had drastically changed the ADR formula, stripping the car of any flourishes that didn’t make it faster—and then budgeting those savings to make the car even faster. A 10-second car was no longer going to cut it. Per Kuniskis, a low-10-second muscle car would be cool to muscle-car guys, but “it wasn’t going to get the guy next door driving a Camry to go, ‘Holy shit, is that a Demon?’” So the goalposts moved, with SRT following a “nines with light” mantra—that is to say a sub-10.0-second quarter-mile car capable of lifting its front tires and letting sunshine hit the pavement. The ADR thus was transforming into a honkin’, stonkin’ Dodge billboard, one that was going to get people talking simply by existing.
SRT quickly covered its program in a cloak of secrecy. As far as the public and most of FCA was concerned, the team was working on the Challenger ADR. That project—as distinct from the actual proto-Demon—was even shown to dealers. Meanwhile, the group working on the car shrank to roughly 25 people, most of whom came from within SRT’s already small ranks. Each time the lawyers deemed a Demon component or feature too insane for production, Kuniskis and company “threw it in the box,” a reference to the $1 Demon Crate option that includes skinny front “runner” wheels, an ECU with a 100-octane fuel tune, tools to change the wheels, a special air cleaner, and more. The outright focus on speed and wheelies meant that any and all comfort and convenience features slated for the ADR were tossed out.
First to go was the ADR’s upgraded and updated interior, whose monetary cost was to later be amortized when it spread to lesser Challengers. Because SRT ditched that interior, it’s no longer happening on any Challenger. If you were eyeing a Challenger but hoping its cabin might be enhanced in the next model year or two, you’re out of luck. The special cabin’s budget was instead diverted to the Demon’s power-boosting A/C intake chiller and a transmission brake. An idea for a disconnecting front anti-roll bar was ditched because it was deemed too difficult to package in the Challenger’s front end, and because novice drag racers might not be able to handle a car without the bar. Ignoring the idea that an inexperienced racer might also have trouble with 840 horsepower, the anti-roll-bar money was instead directed toward developing the Demon’s adaptive dampers, which have a special setting that allows more rear-end squat and thus helps it wheelie. They also revert to a more conventional and stable setup if you lift off the accelerator while executing a run.
To keep these details and more from leaking, SRT kept everything on a need-to-know basis. Meetings for the design and engineering were labeled on internal calendars as regarding a “special edition,” since who would care about yet another special-edition Dodge? When work had to be done by anyone outside of the core Demon team, those people were given only basic part parameters and zero context. Of course, there were questions. According to powertrain guru Chris Cowland, one fuel-pump engineer expressed understandable puzzlement over the amount of fuel flow he was asked to design into his part. When running at peak power, the Demon engine slurps 500 pounds of fuel per hour, or roughly 1.3 gallons per minute.
For suppliers, SRT abandoned typical protocol and obfuscated big-picture details such as overall application, surrounding parts, and more, proffering only the most necessary design specifications. SRT also ran its own simulations to validate the components, a task normally handled by suppliers, and tested all the components itself after they’d been built. Supercharger supplier IHI, for example, was given only a specific airflow bogey and asked to provide a blower.
Go to Hell, Benny
Of all the Demon’s secrets, its name, its all-new engine—the most powerful in company history, no less—and its output targets may have been the biggest. Mopar fans know that the supercharged Hellcat V-8’s code name was Hellcat, after the eponymous fighter jet. Cowland wanted to name the ADR-cum-Demon’s engine program “Top Cat” after a 1961 Hanna-Barbera cartoon, but he knew anything with fighter-jet or cat references would make it obvious a mightier Hellcat engine was in the works. So SRT named the engine Benny, after a pantless, blue cat from Top Cat instead.
SRT eventually set up a separate computer server specifically for Benny’s particulars so that other powertrain engineers couldn’t stumble across the plans. When Benny needed to be dyno’d, equal parts paranoia and clandestine awesomeness saw the team recalibrate Chrysler’s tech-center equipment so the displays would register Hellcat output numbers of 707 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque. Going further, the powertrain was dyno tested mostly at night or on weekends when there’d be as few employees around as possible.
Anyone could have figured out that SRT had something special cooking if they knew where to look. Benny was being tested on dyno C07, one of Chrysler’s two machines capable of handling NASCAR engines and, being rated for 1200 horsepower, the only one beefy enough to handle 840 horses. Similarly, when the Demon engine was running at full power, the tech center’s other engine-testing cells had to be shut down. Per Cowland, the Demon sucks in so much gas, they could either run Benny in the one cell or run other engines in other cells, but not both. Otherwise they’d bump against the building’s fuel-flow capacity.
Testing the Demon in the real world created yet more challenges. When Dodge took the Demon to Gainesville Dragway in November to set Guinness World Records for production-car quarter-mile times and wheelie distance, it had the track staff and EMTs sign nondisclosure agreements without telling them what they weren’t supposed to be talking about. To make the outing seem like a run-of-the-mill vehicle-development exercise, Dodge brought a gaggle of different Challengers, including its non-street-legal Drag Pak model. This helped the Demon tests go somewhat undetected.
The horsepower and torque numbers were confidential to all but roughly 10 people nearly right up until the Demon was launched at the New York auto show this past April. SRT’s Demon test driver, who made more than 800 quarter-mile passes during its development, was unaware of the power figure for most of those runs. He and others would do napkin math to try to extrapolate the figure, of course, but they weren’t told until Kuniskis himself was informed late in the Demon’s development. In fact, the final SAE-certified power figures weren’t revealed to the broader SRT team until half an hour before car’s unveiling in New York.
A full-blown misinformation campaign was waged starting in January of this year to befuddle those outside of FCA and to inform them the ADR had morphed into the Demon. You’ll remember this as the months-long stream of inscrutable and cryptic teaser photos and videos that hinted at the Demon’s capabilities. Those teasers made so little sense out of context (and even in context when fully explained) that they kept the Demon’s biggest secrets, its still unknown power figures and its general performance, largely a mystery. At different times, we speculated that the Demon would be all-wheel drive (it’s not) and that it made 800 horsepower (it makes a lot more than that). Dodge was having fun and clearly accomplishing the ADR’s goal of elevating the brand, as the internet was abuzz with excited speculation over just how insane the Demon might be.
That the Demon blew everyone’s minds even after a wearying teaser campaign is a testament to the insanity baked into SRT’s unholy creation, as well as its status as the world’s fastest street-legal production drag car. Why did FCA agree to build this thing? How did SRT convince its parent company? Because you don’t drop the jaws of enthusiasts and nonenthusiasts alike and get them all talking about Dodge with something that can’t pop a wheelie. Ain’t marketing grand?
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