The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT® Demon started out with a marketing campaign unlike any other. The big question on everyone’s mind was: Will the car live up to the hype?
Wouldn’t you like to know?
For those of you who have been living under a rock and missed out on the history of the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, let me give you a quick back story. Rumors of the car started to surface in 2016 across social media and in the message boards. The conspiracy theories would make “Flat Earth” believers proud. When Dodge began releasing weekly teaser videos in early 2017, the buzz really started to kick up. It was no longer a bunch of car nerds and motorheads making up fake theories and absurd claims of knowing a friend of a cousin of a husband’s uncle who works for Dodge.
The SRT Demon officially stepped out publicly in April 2017 at the New York Auto Show and I was the lucky recipient of an official invitation from Dodge to attend the reveal. There was no way I wouldn’t be there. At the time, I was the proud owner of a 2016 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat, which was the king of the hill. I had to see what would be the next thing to drain my bank account.
The reveal was an epic event that certainly did not disappoint. Hell, Dodge even had pyrotechnics! It was like a Metallica concert in the early ’90s. Tim Kuniskis stood in front of hundreds of people and started dropping the stats and specs on the car. You could hear the sound of jaws hitting the concrete floor. The stats definitely backed up the hype and buzz started by the wild marketing tactics months earlier. I knew, from that moment, there was no way I wasn’t going to get one. I had several months to get my ducks in a row before the ordering banks opened for the 3,000 SRT Demons that would be produced for sale in the US.
From the get-go, people wondered how well the car would perform in real life. Could an every-day drag racer be able to pull off the same impressive stats? People said it’s just an SRT Hellcat with a little more power. The auto world was picking this thing apart like a vulture on a deer carcass.
Now, fast forward to January 2018 when I became the proud owner of a Dodge Challenger SRT Demon. I didn’t buy mine simply to park it in a garage in a bubble to save as a collector’s item. I bought it to drive the holy hell out of it. And for the past year, that’s what I did. Over the next few days, I will take you through five interesting things I have learned so far while owning this epic car. Let’s get into it!
FACT 1:
The 2018 SRT Demon is built on the ultimate foundation and platform for a successful drag car. The SRT Demon is really built on the same chassis as the Challenger. That same chassis was formed from the LX platform that at this point is almost 20 years old. So to say the 2018 SRT Demon is the ultimate chassis to build off of does seem a little strange considering how old it is. That being said, what the Dodge/SRT wizards did to improve, revise, refresh and spruce up the ole gal is pretty impressive. While the car is rather heavy for a drag racing vehicle, they’ve done an incredible job masking a lot of that. When you can say that a production car can run 9 seconds in the quarter-mile straight off the assembly line, I think that speaks for itself. With a near bulletproof drivetrain and powertrain, making more power than most people will ever need, it is obvious they have made enough tweaks to the chassis to make it a successful competitor on the strip. To be able to take a stock car and hit the drag strip as much as you want and run blistering times, consistently, without breaking is just mind blowing. If you are so inclined to try to fix what isn’t broken, it’s the perfect platform to start modifying from as well; which brings us to some other items on the list. Next time, I’ll take you through the driveline.