Up close with the new SRT Viper

There’s a storm brewing over Chrysler’s corporate HQ in Auburn Hills, Michigan, and this time, it’s not metaphorical. As we duck into the executive parking lot, three proto-tornadoes are circling menacingly overhead, the air heavy with atmospheric rage. Moments later, all three touch down with a vengeance, ripping through the countryside and leaving a trail of destruction 10 miles long.

Strangely portentous, given that we’re here to see the rebirth of a specific brand of automotive rolling thunder. The latest iteration of Chrysler’s iconic Viper is lurking in this building, and TopGear will be the first people in the world apart from Chrysler top brass to see it. Turns out the high pressure round here isn’t just atmospheric. Security for this one-off reveal is presidentially tight.

Son of Viper has been developed by a tiny team in a section of the Pentastar HQ known affectionately as Area 51, and this shoot is the first time it’s been allowed out. Chrysler itself is still obviously twitchy about unofficial leakage before its official debut at the 2012 New York show, and the evening is punctuated by security alerts as tired senior execs try to access their car park to go home.

Words: Charlie Turner 

Pics: Webb Bland 

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 edition of Top Gear magazine 

Somehow, my hurried shepherding past a slinky shape badly disguised under a light-blue car cover and insistence that there’s ‘nothing to see here’ increases their curiosity.  The recently deceased Viper hasn’t  been forgotten, and those close to the brand are obviously intrigued. Eventually, the last of the executive army tramps out to face the heavy weather, and we finally get to pull back the cover properly. My initial reaction to the styling is:

“Yup, that’s a Viper.” All the key elements and proportions are present and correct: supertanker-length bonnet, check; cab-back driving position, check; slitted gills, check; even the famous side exit exhausts sitting proud just forward of the rear wheels. All pretty much Viper standard, bar a few extra swages and feature lines. Initially, there’s a shard of surprise the new car has so much of the old car about it, but spend more time in Viper’s presence, and there’s a refinement and a sophistication in the styling that simply didn’t exist before. Radical? Not really. But more different than it first appears. And, as Mark Tressel, head of SRT design and the man responsible for rejuvenating the icon, explains, there are some things you just don’t mess with in Viper land.

“Initially, we did a lot of work that really changed the proportions of the vehicle, but what we started to talk about is that the Viper is iconic, and car companies struggle to create icons. The Jeep Wrangler is an iconic vehicle.

The Porsche 911 is an iconic vehicle, and they’re icons because they’ve always looked that way. They’ve evolved their shape over the years. So we said, ‘We don’t want to reinvent Viper. We don’t need to take it somewhere that we haven’t been.’ So we started to look at how we could evolve the shapes and elements that the customers love.” So the new car gave up on shock-and-awe revolution in favour of something a little more Darwinian. And while it still looks like nothing but a Viper, it wears its bodywork and styling more lightly, with leaner musculature, more LEDs and a whole lot less visual weight.

Less literal weight, too, given that the bonnet (one massive clamshell), double-bubble roof and bootlid are now all wrought from carbon fibre, with the doors made from superformed aluminium. Combine that with careful paring of other elements of the Viper’s anatomy (the drivetrain, for instance, weighs 11kg less), and you have a car that shaves a decent 45kg from the relatively light 1,500kg frame of the Gen_IV Viper, despite wearing a fair few more creature comforts.

But before we get to that, you’ll probably want to know what’s under the hood. Powered by an upgraded version of the all-aluminium, 8.4-litre V10, new Viper produces 640bhp and 600lb ft of torque, giving it the most torque of any normally aspirated sports car ever produced. The block itself – cast originally for the first-gen Viper by Lamborghini, then a subsidiary of Chrysler – has been reworked to increase strength and improve cooling, and now features a forged crank, rods and pistons for extra bombproofing.  

A lighter intake manifold reduces weight at the top of the engine bay, the valve train has been reworked with sodium-filled exhaust valves and the transmission is a rejigged version of the Tremec six-speed that now features tighter ratios and an ally flywheel for faster blats to the 6,400rpm limiter.

None of this is cutting-edge tech, but it represents a leap for the Viper, which was considered a bit of an engineering thug. And relatively light weight versus decent power do add up to one thing: the Viper still has bite, as 0–62mph in 3.7 seconds and a top speed of 208mph will testify. That’s faster than a Merc SLS AMG. Funny that, since the SLS and the Viper were a co-development in the early stages under DaimlerChrysler, before Chrysler’s financial meltdown.

Once under the bonnet, you can’t help but notice the extra ironmongery webbing its merry way across the enormous engine bay. A piece Russ Ruedisueli – head of SRT Motorsports Engineering – is particularly proud of.

“We learned a lot from Viper race cars we’ve built with crossbraces. That’s why that’s there, and I think it’s a beautiful piece. The combination of the clamshell hood, the exposed carbon underneath, and the crossbrace – it’s a big moment when you open up that hood and show it off to folks.”

And not just for car-park bragging rights, either – the ‘Spidey’ (as the Viper team refer to it) contributes to a car that’s 50 per cent stiffer than the previous generation. Now, obviously 50 per cent stiffer than, say, a mattress, is still not particularly stiff and is just a very stiff mattress.

But when the last-gen Viper ACR could lap the Nordschleife in under seven-and-a-half minutes, you get the feeling these guys know how to set up a fast car. And the solid base should give the new suspension a decent platform to push from: the regular car will get top-notch Bilstein shocks, and the GTS gets a two-stage adjustable ‘Damptronic’ system, allowing you to switch from Street to Track via a button in the cabin.

“The Track setting is a big jump from the base car, so the Street setting is a little softer, following feedback from owners who want to be able to drive their significant other out to events,” says Ruedisueli, looking thoughtful. Possibly also people who come straight from driving that 911 or Audi R8 and aren’t quite prepared for the rudimentary characteristics of the old Viper, even if they liked the brawny all-American muscle-car attitude and very – how to put this? – ‘specific’ dynamic characteristics. Ah yes, the Viper ‘characteristics’. It’s fair to say the Viper has a bit of  a reputation, with precisely no cars rivalling its hit rate on the wall of shame that is wreckedexotics.com. Twenty-three pages of unintentional carnage (Ford GT, six pages; Ferrari 599, three pages) attest to the fact that the Viper only featured the rudimentary traction-control systems attached to your ankles.

Any time you strapped yourself in, you were painfully aware that you were operating without a safety net. In the dry, it was a handful in the same way as, say, wrestling a bull is a handful. In the wet, show it anything but respect, and a Viper would have you sitting in a field, picking bits of plastic dashboard out of your teeth before you could say, “I’m pretty sure it won’t wheelspin in third…”

But the game has moved on. Modern customers expect more sophisticated safety systems, and despite Viper’s resolve to ignore namby-pamby traction-control interference up to this point, the new car will feature just that. As Ruedisueli explains:

“We started working on the traction control even before the programme was signed off, because the guys wanted the most sophisticated, quickest-responding stability system. It’s so subtle, we don’t even think we’ll show the traction-control light. It’s a system that’s going to make gods out of people without them even knowing it. It really is that fast.”

So new Viper sounds like it will be just as exciting to drive, but a whole lot easier to manage and harder to crash. But the fact that the Viper is here at all is something of a miracle. In 2009, the US car industry all but imploded, with Chrysler filing for bankruptcy. Twelve months before, with the writing on the wall, a private equity team had looked at the possibility of selling the Viper brand. As Ralph Gilles (CEO of the SRT brand) put it:

“Chrysler saw it as a nice juicy way to gain about $100–200 million in the open market, not realising that the car was kind of a Last of the Mohicans, so to speak. But it didn’t have stability control or any of the aids you’d need in 2014; in fact, the car couldn’t even legally be sold in 2012, because it just wasn’t up to date. So when they did due diligence, they realised how expensive it was going to be to redo without the benefit of what we do here.” And so, in June 2009, Chrysler came blinking into the light from the semi-darkness of US creditor-protected Chapter 11 bankruptcy, finding itself owned by Fiat Group. It was then that the newly appointed CEO Sergio Marchionne finally got to drive Viper, and realise the scale of any potential reinvigoration.  

“He disappeared and did some laps, came out of it, and said: ‘Wow, that’s a whole lot of work,”’ remembers Gilles with a smile. “So he loved it and hated it, like a lot of people do. They get the car. They appreciate it, but it has a lot of interesting characteristics. But now people have become basically two factions, the historic audience for the car and the supercar lover who loves what the car stands for but is intimidated by it.

People who say; if you fix the interior, if you fix the ride, if you make the car more liveable and put some technology into it, then I might consider this car… Sergio had that reaction. And there was enough interest from him to say, “OK, let’s dig into this.”’

And dig they did. Quietly and diligently, until they had a car that Marchionne was happy to sign off. No mean feat when the whole industry is obsessed with efficiency and rationality. For both of which the Viper… isn’t the best of representatives. As another tired exec tries to exit, I take advantage of the distraction and slip down into the Viper’s driving seat. And it’s a bit of a revelation. Lowering yourself into a Viper used to be a ticket to an interior closely resembling a high-speed accident between World of Leather and a Fisher-Price delivery lorry. Not any more. The level of quality and detail in here will worry Audi and Porsche.

Gone are the cheap plastics and poor fit and finish. You’re wrapped in the same leather you’d find on the inside of a Bentley, and it feels like it. Our shoot car is clad in red and black leather with contrasting red stitching, and the detail and precision is pretty much bang-on. There are nice little gems of surprise’n’delight spread round the cabin, too: the cubby at the end of the transmission has a map of Laguna Seca – a famed hunting ground for previous Vipers – punched into it, and the passenger doorpull features the Nürburgring. James will be delighted. But there’s also a more basic change – the driving position.

You sit lower in the new bespoke Sabelt seats, staring out over the generous bonnet. With the redesigned bubble roof, there’s an extra 40mm of headroom and 90mm of legroom, if you include the additional space offered by the adjustable pedal box. It feels bigger inside, but lower and more connected. It’s good – if you’re comfortable, you can go quicker. The hardware will give those medium-range sports and supercar buyers pause for thought, too. Harman Kardon provides the entertainment system.

The dials and TFT displays will take you through a myriad of the usual settings, but with some nice grin-inducing stabs at humour. Turn the traction control off, and the screen shows a Viper burning off into the distance, leaving orange scorch marks.

As you hit the beginning of the red line (6,200rpm), the centre of the rev counter glows red and the new Viper logo – which Chrysler has dubbed somewhat cheesily ‘Stryker’ – appears dead centre. “Yeah, we were worried about putting that feature in there in case people buzzed the engine from cold to show their mates,” says Gilles. Much as I’d like to stay in here finding new hiding places for snakes, I’m soon ushered out by a security guard. Outside, the storm has passed, and our exclusive time with the Viper is over.

On go the covers, and off goes the car to the New York show. Our encounter with the Viper has made a big impression. It’s not a revolution. But there’s a joy in it that’s impossible to ignore. A car made for petrolheads by petrolheads, whose thin veneer of civility can’t disguise its undimmed and outrageous attitude. The King is dead. Long live the King.