In fact 1 I took you through the foundation on which the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT® Demon was built. Let’s talk about the highly discussed driveline, shall we?
FACT 2:
Early on, many people rolled their eyes at the SRT Demon, claiming it was nothing more than an SRT Hellcat with slightly more power. On the surface, I can see why people would think that. However, when you start hitting the track or modifying this beast, you really start to see that isn’t the case at all. The SRT Hellcat has been out for four years now and the people at Dodge/SRT paid close attention to what all of us were doing to these cars both on and off the track. If you wanted to run your SRT Hellcat on the track and get decent results, you would have to install a good set of drag radials for some legitimate traction. The bad news is tire spin was sort of the “fuse” for the driveline. What I mean is the tires would spin, freeing up all the stress on the driveline so things wouldn’t break. When you toss in a nice set of tires and get instant traction, you no longer have that “fuse”. We saw a fair number of driveshafts and rear differentials break on stock SRT Hellcats. One of the first mods for any racer was an upgraded one-piece aftermarket driveshaft and rear differential brace just to prevent those incidents from happening at the track. I’m happy to report that at almost 1,100 rwhp on my SRT Demon, the stock driveshaft and rear diff are holding up great.
Other early modifications most SRT Hellcat racers installed was an unlocked PCM and dual fuel pumps. In order to tune the SRT Hellcat, racers had to buy a specially unlocked PCM and once SRT Hellcat racers started cranking out more power, dual fuel pumps became a must-have add-on to the car. The Dodge/SRT engineers took note and made sure dual fuel pumps were stock on the SRT Demon and that the PCM was provided in the SRT Demon crate engine already unlocked and ready to go. This really led to the car being an extremely consistent and well-performing drag car right out of the gate, and changed the modification formula pretty significantly.
Now for those of you who are hell-bent on making modifications, check back soon as I will give you some mods to consider.