Welcome to Dodge's 100th birthday party

As a thundercloud of tyre smoke billows away into the night air, the familiarly vulpine face of Richard Rawlings, creator, host and star of US car-build show Fast n' Loud, appears on stage, points both hands at the baying audience and declares in one of his trademark quips: "Get You Some of THAT!" The crowd, as only a crowd can, goes wild.

They've got every reason to. Not just because he has trashed another set of tyres purely in the interest of pyrotechnics. And not just because he - the new face of US renegade and alternative car culture - has told them to. The couple of thousand people are all here for one key reason: they own Dodges and they are proud of it.

Pictures: Rowan Horncastle

Tribal gatherings are nothing new, especially among car enthusiasts. But this one is still a bit more special than your average Allegro Club International get-together. The people here have been invited to Dallas, Texas to celebrate all things Dodge as it's the muscle car brand's 100th anniversary.

The company began as the Dodge Brothers Company in Detroit in 1900, when the pair left Ford to set up on their own. They started by making car parts for the big three US carmakers on their doorstep, before moving into car production itself in 1915. It was sold to Chrysler in 1928 and has remained, through thick and thin, with the Pentastar brand ever since.

Appropriately, each of the attendees at this event has had to front a $100 entry fee to be here. All of which has been refunded if they arrived in a Dodge. And by the looks of things, most of them have got their money back. The initial count puts the number of cars here at over a thousand, apparently hailing from 38 states and two countries. So there's a predictably huge cross section of the old, the new and the utterly barking.

A walk through one of the many car parks lined with neatly arranged Dodges - the brand has now got the SRT bit back under its wing as of this year - reveals that the owners have been into self-expression long before social media was invented. One towering owner has decorated the engine bay of his Challenger to make it look like a pinball machine.

Another has a weird Transformers-like set-up that allows its panels to explode outwards like a primitive beetle's defence mechanism. And then there are the rows and rows of bone stock cars that encompass almost the entire century of Dodge's history.

You can tell the owners with OCD as they have all the papers and every - every - receipt for the car from the day it was made to today, all proudly displayed next to their pristine cars. And it's not difficult to discern the extroverts, with their luminous lime green turbocharged Vipers and bright yellow Chargers. There are a few opportunistic ‘for sale' signs hanging in the window of some cars, but generally people seem to be here to play rather than sell.

That would definitely include rock gods Mötley Crüe. Having embarked on their Final, That's It, Never Again (so don't ask) - or something like that - World Tour, they have swerved over to Dallas for this one-off event. It's not a total shock as their tour is sponsored by Dodge.

But it's still quite a coup to have these monsters of stadium rock playing a venue that's not much bigger than many of their backstage green rooms at other gigs. Especially here in Dallas. So why here in a smallish (for Texas) multiplex and not in somewhere more rocktastic like LA?

Four reasons: one, Dodge already does a heap of events in California, so it doesn't need another. Particularly as the people of Texas buy more Dodges than any other state. Two, Richard Rawlings is the new front man for Dodge's marketing, and he is based here in Dallas. Three, he has just opened a live music venue next to his first wildly successful Gas Monkey Bar & Grill - named after his Gas Monkey Garage from the show.

And four, he'd promised his buddy, Dennis, that he'd have Mötley Crüe play for him on his 50th birthday, which is today. When he'd promised that a decade or more ago, he was thinking more of a performance on a TV at the bottom of the garden, not live and in person. But both seemed to be enjoying, if a little disbelieving of, the vision becoming a reality.

One of the other more subtle but still powerful messages on this most unlikely of nights, filled in every direction with Vipers and Hellcats doing volcanic burnouts and punters tattooing their love for the brand on any exposed piece of skin they can find, is that this centennial party also feels like the beginning of the end, not just for the Crüe heavy metal rockers, but for the heavy metal Dodge cars, too.

The subtitle to the Crüe's tour is ‘All Bad Things Must Come to an End', and they've even penned a new track with that name to celebrate that fact - bad being good in rock language. But it also seems like a fitting anthem for the century of Dodge's big-block V8s and V10s, which, as much as we love them, appear to be only just hanging onto life now by the thinnest of threads thanks to the sales of things like the all-electric, polar bear-friendly Fiat 500e in LA.

I shout that thought above all the din to Dodge president and CEO Tim Kuniskis, but he doesn't take the bait. He knows that the Hellcats and Vipers are gloriously out of whack with the Prius and Tesla sets and encourages us to get one while we still can. But he's also bullish about the future of the massively powerful, reasonably priced Dodges. New technologies will definitely feature, he says, but he doesn't see the big V8s dying for quite a while yet. With different tech, yes. Dead, no.

Couple Tim's observations with some chat I had with a Dodge engineer recently, in which he mapped out, hypothetically, that a new Dodge supercar could have four-wheel drive, a hybrid drivetrain (especially if some of Ferrari's tech has now been opened up to the rest of the group) and a big V8, and it sounds like the next 100 years of Dodge is in safe hands. It's not really the configuration that matters, it's the way it makes you gasp for breath that's important.

But we'll have to stop there now as the cops have turned up. I look at a group of revellers next to me, and we roll our eyes and shake our heads at each other. A few seconds later, we realise that it's not a legal intervention. It's a police escort for four triple black Hellcats, which duly file into a small makeshift arena then begin to skid about in a most undiplomatic fashion. It's a small space and the cars are moving quickly - and largely sideways - but miraculously none of them slaps into another. That's good news not just for the mechanics, but also the crowd, as when the cars stop, out jump the four members of the Crüe.

This is the first time in years we've seen them this close, so I casually mention it would be great to meet them. A few minutes, several flashes of access all areas wristbands and lots of barked commands into walkie- talkies, I'm standing in front of the band for a brief chat before they go on stage. Tommy Lee, legendary mooner of crowds and ex-hubby of Baywatch's Pamela Anderson, shakes my hand politely and says hi. Then Mick Mars, looking understandably frail, reaches forward and squeezes my hand like he's wringing the neck of his guitar.

After that experience, I settle for a fist-bump with bassist Nikki Sixx and front man Vince Neil, then ask them what they are driving - Dodges, right? "Right," says Vince. "I just got a real sweet Viper. But it's a stick [manual] and it's been a long time since I drove one of those, you know? Stalled it three or four times on the freeway on the way home. But I love that car." Of course he does. The hand-built V10 is the perfect automotive analogue for the Crüe's crooner. He couldn't, shouldn't drive anything else. Both of them are going to stop doing what they do eventually but, despite appearances, not for a while yet.

Good.