Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat 2015 Review

For plenty of people, that’s enough road test data and perspective right there.

It is, as has been pointed out to me, difficult to have a bad time with 707 horsepower. Back in the day, too much horsepower was a universal ointment. Some of the world’s most fondly remembered races and rallies have involved underdone chassis and suspension engineering going toe-to-toe with the world’s most nimble sports cars by virtue of an indomitable surfeit of gristle. Dodge has taken us back to those days.

In our more modern language, Dodge’s flag-in-the-sand muscle car delivers 527kW of power out of its 6.2-litre supercharged stretched-beyond-recognition V8. It then backs that up with 881Nm of torque.

It does this with an engine that was, in an era of downsized V8s doing outrageous things with less than five litres, big to start with and effectively embiggened with a supercharger. A big supercharger. It’s not monstrously high tech, though, with indirect fuel-injection, pushrods driving the 16 valves and a cast-iron block beneath them.

And then Dodge stuck it all into a two-door car that wasn’t all that flash to start with. They’ve done work everywhere to make it as socially acceptable and non-lethal as they could, with new suspension geometry and hardware at both ends, bigger brakes and the hardest working traction control in the history of the car industry.

There are three-stage Bilstein dampers at every corner, bigger Brembo anchors lurking inside the wheels and a heightened awareness from the skid-control system. It has three modes, topping out at the Track mode, and even has a line-locker system to allow you to destroy the rear tyres even faster than normal.

It’s based around a long-since superseded Mercedes-Benz E-Class architecture and there’s probably a good reason why AMG never stuffed it with this much power even when it was a fresh chassis.

Whatever else they might have done to tie the monster down, the Challenger Hellcat is, at heart, a very crude weapon.

That crudeness has its own charm, of course, in an era of ultra-sophisticated powertrains. Especially when it shakes the body on its springs when you kick the big motor into life.

You shake leaves off trees, too, and you can almost see paint pealing off street signs. It’s loud. Exceptionally loud. It’s louder than any Lamborghini or Ferrari I’ve ever driven and folks around Zuffenhausen privately question how those things sneak through noise emission regulations. How this thing is legal is beyond me.

The scary thing is that it’s almost infinitely louder outside the car than inside it. It’s so much louder – and deeper and richer – in its engine note that you’re never going to drive with the windows up, even if you’re in a hailstorm. If anybody annoys you at the lights with loud music doof-doofing up the serenity, all you have to do is stand on the throttle pedal and watch them cringe.

It sounds a lot sweeter than you expect, too, but that doesn’t mean you should take it for granted. Ever. It is a sleeping ferocious animal that doesn’t sleep very much.

It sleeps enough to let you look around, though, and you quickly realise that this is the Lancer Evo of the Americas. All the money has been spent beneath the metal, not inside the cabin.

Oh, they’ve tried, but there is a lot of plastic in here, the pedals don’t quite line up and you need an extra elbow joint to access anything in the cupholders. And even if you give up and just leave the drinks in the holders, they’ll foul your elbow whenever you change gear.

The organisation of the cabin looks a bit more sophisticated in patches and less so in others, but the steering wheel (which you use a lot, so pay attention) sits comfortably in the hands even if the spokes are a bit fat and occasionally get in the way in busy moments.

Australians should be quite familiar with cars like this. Its handling feels a lot like a 1990s Tickford Falcon, with a significant up-over-down moment from the rear-end every time you change directions. It delivers countless heart-in-the-mouth moments at speed, especially on direction changes as you hope that the 'down' part of the up-over-down sticks, rather than bounces on the outside spring or slides.

Its steering is direct and fast, without delivering a lot of feel or progression, and the body rolls awkwardly on its suspension, even in its hardest-hitting Track mode.

Track mode should, as it suggests, be left for the track. It’s just too hard for public roads and doesn’t keep the tyres on the road as often as you’d like as you cross even modest bumps. It’s actually an imperfection-detection system and, at this, it’s far more effective than any laser or electron microscope.

Its default setting is just too wallowing to be of any use on anything but the roughest real estate, so that leaves Sport, which is where you have to leave it. Well, there is the option of splitting the suspension setting from the powertrain setting, so Sport suspension and Track for the engine and skid-control is even better.

For all its five-link rear suspension system, handling isn’t its high point. It’s not actually any kind of point at all. Nor is its core grip. The respected Car & Driver magazine in the US is a bit jingoistic about the Challenger Hellcat and even they couldn’t generate more than 0.92 lateral g on a dry skidpan. For perspective, that’s about the same number you’ll get out of some pretty humble hatchbacks.

Part of the reason for that is that the Hellcat doesn’t carry a lot of tyre. In fact, for this much power, it carries a ludicrous lack of rubber, but there were limits to what would fit (and, more likely, limits to how much people wanted to spend on the car’s most voraciously consumable item).

There are 275/40 R20s all round and, even if they were 100mm wider, they’d still be nowhere near enough.

The Americans think this is a reasonable handler. They’re wrong. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad. What it does mean is that you have to pay absolute attention anytime you drive it, anywhere.

It’s a throwback to an era when cars didn’t do their mortal best to save you from frightening incidents, skill shortfalls or inattention. Nope. Think of it as an American version of a Murcielago, but with a skid-control system that has too much to control.

That kind of handling would be manageable at manageable speeds, but for most people the Hellcat doesn’t have manageable speeds.

Instead, it outsprints the V10 Viper to 240km/h and, Dodge says, it gets to 100km/h in 3.6 seconds. A quarter-mile takes just 11.7 seconds, crossing the tape at more than 200km/h.

There is, you have to remind yourself, more power here than in anything remotely close to this sort of money. AMG doesn’t sell a car with this much power, neither does M or quattro.

In fact, the cheapest European front-engined, rear-drive car with this much power is the Ferrari F12 Berlinetta. Sure, it handles a lot better, but you can have about five Hellcats for the same money. And you’ll probably be happy you have spares.

Then there’s the gearbox. It’s six speeds of muscle-building haphazardness, jerking and metallic and crunching in equal measure, and it pays faithful homage to agriculture. Plus its gates are set at a slightly odd angle that make it difficult to cleanly sort out third gear. Ever.

But it goes. It goes phenomenally. Nothing in a high-rise metal suit goes this hard, and it goes this hard all the time. Whether you want it to or not. You just find yourself always, always going hard.

It’s so brutally quick that whoever set the 3.6-second time at HQ must have more feel in their feet than surgeons have in their fingertips. It’s damned near impossible to get the thing off the line without either bogging it or slipping the clutch. Or sending little balls of burnt rubber into the wheel-arches.  

This last thing is what it does best and it’s also the easiest way to get it off the line cleanly. I know, try telling that to a Victorian policeman, right?

It’s like that’s what it was born to do, because it feels like its natural state of being. You'll spend more on tyres than you will on fuel. And you'll spend an awful lot on fuel, with even Dodge admitting to more than 13L/100km on the light-throttle combined fuel economy test.

In fact, so enamoured is the Hellcat of frying its tyres that it will do it even at the upper reaches of its rev range. In fourth gear. On a dry road.

That engine is loud enough to trick you into thinking noise is its party trick. But it isn’t. Its trick is being a touch soft down low below 2000rpm and then brutally strong in the mid range and so ferocious around 6500rpm that you feel like a baby gazelle being set upon by a pride of lions. Except you like it.

It hurls you into the surprisingly comfortable and supportive seats in fourth gear like most reasonably quick cars do in second. It hates the horizon and wants to bash it, all while bellowing that wicked tune, with the supercharger whining at the work when it’s breathing hard.

But be very, very careful with the Challenger SRT Hellcat. It’s not always friendly, even if it’s fun. It will bite.

Its traction control light strobes so hard and fast that it needs one of those TV news warnings for epileptics. Its skid control light isn’t far behind.

You have to wash off speed earlier than you expect whenever a corner approaches. That’s partly because everything else that eats short straights like this is a tarmac-skimming thoroughbred, not a four-seat coupe based on a four-door sedan based on an old Mercedes-Benz four-door sedan.

And it’s partly because you have to leave it time to return all of its front spring travel after braking to have a chance of turning it in without panic.

So it’s wholly inadequate for the job at hand, right? Wrong.

It’s hilarious. It’s a 100 per cent giggle, all the time. It’s brilliantly bad. It’s a throwback.

For people of a certain age, it’s like driving along with the radio on Triple J and hearing Dancing in the Dark come on. In an age of sophisticated cars, it takes you back to the 1980s and a simpler time; a time when you had to develop your skills and make fast decisions for yourself.

But that’s how it feels for children of the rear-drive era. Those who grew up in skid-controlled front-drivers should probably stay away, because it will feel like a pants-wetting, freckle-puckering monster that will try to kill you about 14 times a day.

It's the sort of car you hope your neighbour buys so you can smile when you hear it go past, but it's so underdone in so many areas, is so under-tyred and so wiggle-and-squrim in corners that you couldn't, with any conscious, recommend that anybody actually buy it – even if it was built in right-hand drive.

But 707hp is a lot -- a lot -- of horsepower. And it’s never, ever boring. Tiring, sure, but boring? No.

And if I already had five cars in my garage, I doubt I’d complain if the sixth one was a Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat.