The Challenger may be dead, alongside its four-door sibling, the Charger, and the mighty Hellcat family that was born for drag racing and humiliating supercars every now and then. However, Dodge's duo lives on in the real world, where various Hellcats and the occasional Demon, including the whopping 170, keep making headlines by doing what they were born to do.
Case in point, let's turn our attention to the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat, as we just encountered a silver example that wanted to rule over the competition at the Mission Raceway Park in Canada. Judging by that bulging hood and fat rear tires, it's not your run-of-the-mill V8-powered muscle car, but something quite different, which is believed to have been touched by the tuning stick.
It may not need more power, as even the base Hellcats had a neck-snapping 707 horsepower on tap. The output climbed to 797 horsepower for the Jailbreak and Redeye, which were ten-second cars down the 1/4-mile. The Demon enjoys 840 hp, and the Demon 170 had up to 1,025 hp on tap in its top spec, being capable of humiliating some of the fastest machines out there in straight-line acceleration.
Photo: Screenshot Youtube | Wheels
Nonetheless, it appears that this Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat sports a bit more power than its stock self. We cannot reveal the number of horses deployed to the rear wheels whenever the driver pushes the throttle all the way down, as we don't know how much oomph it has. Still, it's probably enough to teach the Tesla Model S Plaid a thing or two about fast takeoffs and crossing the finish line first. Or is it?
We recently saw a Tesla Model S wipe the floor with a Dodge Viper, though that one had less power than the aforementioned Hellcat. The electric hyper sedan needs just a little over 16 seconds to reach 186 mph (300 kph) from rest. Naught to sixty takes as little as 1.99 seconds, and this model boasts 1,020 horsepower combined from its tri-motor setup. Thus, it certainly has the grunt to put the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat in its corner.
These two different yet ultra-fast rides settled their dispute in a couple of quarter-mile drag races from a standing start. The winner completed the run in almost 9.5 seconds at 148 mph (238 kph), and the loser did it in a hair over the ten-second mark at 140 mph (225 kph). The second run saw a similar result being displayed on the two boards.
But which one was the winner on that day? You can find out by watching the two-minute video below. You can head to the image gallery above if you feel like cheating. That said, did the result surprise you?
After a series of unfortunate events put an end to Cristian's dream of entering a custom built & tuned old-school Dacia into a rally competition, he moved on to drive press cars and write for a living. He's worked for several automotive online journals and now he's back at autoevolution after his first tour in the mid-2000s. Full profile
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