Watching from the pit wall at Virginia International Raceway, the engineers from Chrysler’s elite SRT division can only shake their heads. Everyone on the track is showing a surprising lack of, shall we say, testosterone with the new Dodge Viper ACR. Only 20 journalists got the nod to attend its launch and more than half of them hold active racing licenses, yet even the best drivers are backing off when approaching the kink in the front straight.
“That’s where you grab fifth gear, not where you slow down,” an engineer says to no one in particular. He sees me raise an eyebrow. “The car can do it,” he assures me. “It makes nearly a ton of downforce. It can get fifth gear before the brake zone. It sure does when I’m driving it.” Then he looks at me as if to weigh my heart, the way they say the ancient god Anubis did before permitting souls to enter the afterlife.
Five minutes later, it's my turn to get in the car.
I should be confident. I’d done pretty well racing on the same course earlier in the year—but that was in a 175-horsepower hatchback. This, on the other hand, is a 645-horsepower Apollonian chariot, a bold statement of egotistical priapism that will punish the slightest mistake in fire and blood. I have a 6-year-old son. I want to see him again. But more than that, I want to be the first guy to hold the throttle open through the kink. So as I come through the winding downhill called the Roller Coaster to complete my first lap, I let the car slip out to the curb at a grip level sufficient to paste loose objects to the inside of the driver’s window. I feel the back end skip ever so slightly as I get on the gas, a menacing flourish not unlike Mike Tyson cracking his knuckles before asking you a question. I grab fourth, point down the straight, and …
A lot of people, particularly the kind of people with the money to spend on a weekend supercar, are a bit contemptuous and a bit scared of the Viper. Since its introduction in 1992, the car, with its enormous V-10 engine, hyper-phallic shape, and wanton disregard for basic civility, has been a caricature of a supercar. Hell, the damn thing has sidepipes, which sound like mortars and sear your leg if you aren’t careful. The Viper has the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the same approximate level of sophistication. It’s seemingly designed and engineered exclusively to piss off the eco-conscious and socially responsible. As such, it’s got a reputation for attracting, shall we say, the bluer collars in the country club. But it also has a reputation for being a wickedly sharp track weapon that rewards the talented and punishes the foolish.
The ACR—American Club Racing, a moniker Chrysler bestows upon those very few models designed specifically and exclusively for track use—is all of those things, but even more so. So you’d be forgiven for dismissing the 2016 Viper ACR as another blunt instrument for highly successful drywall contractors to stuff into racetrack barriers at hold-my-beer-and-watch-this velocities. You’d also be completely wrong. The third Viper to wear the ACR badge is capable of lapping a track at speeds few cars available at any price can approach, let alone match. But this time it’s science and refined engineering, not brute strength, making it possible.
This new Viper is packed with tech, and the guys behind it possess high-speed testing courage and low-humor nerd chic in equal quantities. This much was clear when head engineer Russ Ruedlisueli kept referring to Princess Leia and TIE fighters when describing the car. The Princess is the fascia laid over the rectangular thin film transistor LCD display. It looks a lot like a certain Alderranian royal. It’s purely aesthetic, but the fact SRT did it proves the sci-fan is strong in these guys.
The TIE fighter, on the other hand, is all business. That’s what Ruedlisueli and his crew call the enormous, almost Gigeresque wing that rises from the rear like the Death Star rounding Yavin. It’s up there so high you catch only the tiniest glimpse of carbon fiber in the top of your rearview mirror. The engineers call its two massive supports “twisted stanchions” and boast that they went through 600 iterations in computational fluid dynamics to nail the design. The wing itself is fantastically complex in all three dimensions, sized in a manner that would not disgrace a Caspian ekranoplan, and it helps generate nearly a ton of downforce at full speed.
The wing is part of the Extreme Aero Package, a name that is so perfectly Viper and includes a slab-like front splitter and other appendages designed to break, or at least cheat, the laws of physics. You see, most cars can’t corner at a G level above the power of Earth’s gravity. Why? Well, it’s simple: they only have Earth’s gravity pushing them down. But add the power of a massive wing turned upside down and suddenly you’re exceeding what gravity can do alone. And then you're exceeding it in a constant-radius, high-speed turn, just like a Formula 1 racer.
Yes, it adds a whole lot of drag, cutting 30 mph from the base model’s top speed of 206 mph. But this isn’t a car for people who do their racing on Internet forums. It’s for drivers who understand that, on a road course, cornering speed is king and straight-line speed is an afterthought.
The SRT guys are indecently proud of their wings and dive planes and strakes and splitters, the same way the guys who lift weights at Venice Beach are proud of their tribal tats. But this Viper isn’t just about that. The team spent nearly two years refining the rest of the car. Six-piston calipers clamp down on carbon rotors only a little smaller than manhole covers. Aluminum Bilstein suspension saves weight and allows an educated driver to configure the car for the specific demands of a particular track. Only the engine, a massive 8.4-liter V10 tuned to make 645 horsepower and enough torque to pull a battleship, remains unchanged. But then, having enough engine never has been the Viper’s problem.
VIR is a fast, generally safe track with a few sections that require real, uh, bravado to carry. The Grand course, a 4.1-mile ribbon with about 15 stories of elevation change, is famous for exposing a car’s weaknesses, particularly with the suspension and brakes. So as I strap myself in and fire up the engine, I wonder just how fast I’ll be going when I find the car’s Achilles heel, and how long it will take to repair the damage to the car, my reputation, and my intestines. But I keep hearing that engineer: The car can do it.
Can it ever.
Down the front straight, I feel that big wing holding the car down, and back, as the speedometer sweeps past 140. Turn 1 is coming up fast, so I stand on the brake … and the car humiliates me. The carbon-ceramic brakes, bigger and stronger than anything on any Viper before now, scrub speed so quickly and easily that I reach my cornering speed 30 feet sooner than expected. As if that weren’t enough, I realize mid-corner that my entry speed, which I’d thought would be quite fashionably daring and possibly bring a spontaneous cheer from onlookers, isn't even making the tires squeak.
It's all my fault. Intellectually, I know the ACR can grip the same way a World Challenge racer can, but my cowardly heart needs convincing. I have to trust the wings, trust the suspension, trust the engineering. Once I suck it up and do what my brain tells me should be possible, I discover the Viper has cornering limits well beyond any street-legal vehicle you can buy in the US. Think of it this way: Remember that old minivan your parents had? Did you ever drive it? Then, later in life, when you bought a Corvette or a BMW, marvel at how much faster it was through the corners?
A base-model Corvette, bless its capable and impressive heart, is like a minivan compared to how the ACR grips and corners.
When the tires do start to slip, around the time the g-forces make my neck feel like I’m in a Nautilus machine, they do so with the communicative gentleness of a good all-season performance tire, not the street-legal, race-ready slicks wrapped around 19-inch wheels the SRT guys say provide the "largest footprint in the business."
The Climbing Esses are a test of courage. In a Miata, you can take it flat. In an M3, you hit the brakes before you get there. We’ve been asked to tap the brake a bit before entering the first turn, in deference to our ride-along instructors and the irreplaceability of these pre-production cars. It’s necessary to change direction almost in midair at well over 120 mph, and indeed the ACR seems to hop off the ground ever so slightly over the first rise, causing my passenger to grab reflexively at the handle on the right side of the console. The g-force threatens to overwhelm the senses at this speed. It's up then whomp then squeak then rumble then WHARRRRRGH from the engine.
The stiff-armed truculence commonly associated with Vipers has been replaced by fingertip precision. Grinning behind my mirrored visor, I open the throttle the rest of the way as we head up the hill, entering the final right-hand curve with enough drift angle to make a Hollywood stunt director nod in appreciation. It’s just so right. It’s what I thought race cars would be like before I drove them and learned they are lashed-up nightmares with sharp edges all over the interior. The ACR does whatever I want it to do, period, point-blank.
Through the sharp-cornered inner loop, the Viper changes direction with the ease of the best small two-seaters. Just stomp the brake and turn; if you’ve pushed too far the back end is trivially easy to catch. The intimidation that was part and parcel of the old-school Viper experience is gone, replaced with what feels like the ability to violate the laws of physics with the same ease that the V-10 violates the laws of traffic.
You really can’t ask too much of this car. I’m taking it relatively easy in most sections, staying off most of the curbs, and still lapping the Grand course in well under three minutes. In other words: you can put your grandmother in this car and drive a lazy lap that will outpace a pro racer in something like an M3. Capable isn’t the word.
At a base price of $117,500, the Viper ACR isn’t just the thinking man’s supercar. It’s also a screaming deal. Compared to the concessions demanded by every other car of this capability at even double the price, the ACR’s bare-bones, three-speaker-stereo interior is a modest price to pay. But if you don’t like it, the "1 of 1" program will let you load it up with everything from maroon quilted leather to a high-power audio system. We’ll take it just as it sits. The Star Wars fans on the SRT crew have built an X-Wing for the road and road course, a long-nosed starfighter that fairly vibrates with furious purpose. If you’re enough of a rebel to try one, you won’t be disappointed.
And that first lap I took? I never had a doubt as I slotted fifth gear and treated the pitlane bystanders to a miniature sonic boom. The SRT guys were right. If you trust the aero and the tires, there is more capacity in the ACR than is dreamt of in the cautious autojournalists’ philosophies.
