#dragsters

If you went to bed last night worried that Dodge doesn’t field enough Challenger variants to satisfy your diverse driving whims, rest easy tonight. The Challenger, which harbors more personas than David Bowie, wants you to go to the dragstrip again.

For 2019, the Challenger R/T Scat Pack gives birth to a new offering that, while borrowing much of the defunct SRT Demon’s launch-assist hardware, rejects its hellish dragster predecessor’s supercharged 6.2-liter in favor of 6.4 liters of naturally aspirated grunt.

NHRA drag racer and 16-time Funny Car champion John Force has been released from the hospital after a moderately heinous crash Sunday evening at the Arizona Nationals. The 68-year-old strip veteran was going head to head with Jonnie Lindberg when his engine exploded just feet from the finish line.

Fortunately, John won the race but the explosion blew apart the car’s bodywork and sent him into Lindberg’s lane. The vehicles collided as Force’s Chevy-powered dragster slammed into the far wall. Lindberg’s car, slowed by the initial impact and now entangled in the other vehicle’s parachute chord, was hit from behind a second time before both vehicles skidded to a stop against the opposite wall. The much older Force was transported to Chandler Regional Hospital as a precaution, while Lindberg was given a clean bill of health onsite.

Dodge has been parsing out minor details on the Demon, slowly shaping its identity, for what seems like decades, when it has actually only been about a month. In today’s publicity sprig, Fiat Chrysler indicated that — unlike the Hellcat — the Demon will be strip-focused with a suspension setup specifically designed exclusively for straight-ahead speed.

With Dodge claiming that the Hellcat is the “ultimate do everything muscle car” with an intention “to strike that perfect balance between drag strip brute force, road course competence and street car civility,” I am left wondering just how streetable the Demon could possibly be. Like most purpose-built cars, dragsters are wonderful at doing exactly one thing and absolutely terrible at everything else. For Dodge’s new hype machine, the added forward momentum might come at the expense of hanging a right.