Hennessey has given the Dodge Hellcat Redeye 1,035bhp

Can we just stop and take a moment to remember that a thousand horsepower is massive. A ridiculous over-endowment of a road-going engine. And yet since the Bugatti Veyron and various Koenigseggs made it commonplace, we’ve become used to 1,000bhp. It seems like you could get 1,000bhp from… almost anything.

Including an ageing muscle car with ancient humble underpinnings. Yes, this is a 1,035bhp Dodge Challenger Hellcat Redeye, thanks to the superchargin’ stylings of Hennessey Performance Engineering. Who else?

The Redeye was already a silly beat, building on the hardly sensible Challenger Hellcat with added lunacy from the drag racer Demon. The Redeye borrows the Demon’s supercharging, its beefier rods and pistons, and a fuel pump that flows faster than Al Gore’s tears. So, power was already up from 707bhp to 797bhp. Enough, surely?

Negative, ghost rider. Hennessey’s package adds a 4.5-litre supercharger (the standard one is ‘only' a 2.7-litre blower). Yikes. The engine’s breathing is thoroughly reworked, ending up in 1,035bhp at the crank and 880bhp at the rear wheels. Surrounded by a lot of smoke.

Caveat o’clock: you need race fuel to match these numbers, with regular petrol churning out a bit less bang for your buck. The standard car, in Widebody form, reaches 60mph in 3.4sec and runs sub-11sec quarter-miles. So you’ll be going quicker than that, but we can’t say how much. ‘Enough’, is the most appropriate answer.

The package will set you back $35,000, which might seem like a lot of money for 200bhp, but when it’s 200bhp on top of 800bhp that’s already there, that’s probably yep, enough.