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Fang Time: Following a two-year absence, the Viper returns with a 640-hp set of lungs. We visit the plant and talk to the men who made it happen.
Russ Ruedisueli, 53, is sitting in his office at Chrysler’s Technology Center in Auburn Hills, Michigan, although he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t sit so much as crouch, muscles tensed and twitching, as if he’s attached to a pair of unseen jumper cables beneath his desk. You’d figure the guy was in pain except for his perpetual smile.
“I remember when the original Viper got rolling [in 1989], and Bob Lutz [Chrysler president at that time] called a bunch of car-guy employees into the styling dome,” Ruedisueli reminisces. “He rolled the car in, started it up, and said to us, ‘So, who’s interested in being on this program?’ I was so geeked, I about fainted. But at the time, I was working on a different Chrysler program, and they wouldn’t let me go. It felt like a huge lost opportunity. To be in this position today, 20-some years later, having this second chance, well . . .”
Ruedisueli’s voice trails off and is replaced by a smile so big that his ears move. He involuntarily hoists his butt another few inches off his chair, and now his head hovers just below a shattered yellow nose cone from his Formula Ford, currently serving as office sculpture. “That’s a casualty of a Turn Eight brake check at Road America,” he explains.
In 2009, the SRT guys began sketching the Viper before the program was approveda practice usually forbidden. In the end, they incorporated the styling themes of three of the six final drawings. Ralph Gilles thinks theres a bit of Halle Berrys shape in the car. Is that weird?
Ruedisueli is Chrysler’s head of engineering for SRT and Motorsports, and he’s the vehicle line executive for the fifth-gen Dodge Viper. Except it’s not a Dodge anymore. It’s an SRT, because the Dodge name wasn’t deemed spiffy enough to be slapped on the rump of anything fetching just north of $100,000 (for the base SRT Viper) and $120,000 (for the more upscale SRT Viper GTS, as shown here).
The last of the previous-gen Vipers rolled out of Detroit’s rough-and-tumble Conner Avenue plant in the summer of 2010. As Chrysler madly stuffed corks in all of its financial leaks, the Viper brand was slated to be sloughed off to the highest bidder. To any bidder. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and the brand not only survived but was resuscitated. But it took a lot of heart massage.
“I knew that the very last thing Chrysler needed during our bankruptcy was a 600-hp sports car,” says Ralph Gilles, the 42-year-old president and CEO of SRT and senior VP of Chrysler Product Design. “But I’m an optimist. I wanted to fight for a chance. We discussed it for a year. I got Sergio [Marchionne, Chrysler CEO] to drive one of the last Vipers. He jumped in and disappeared to God knows where. He came back 15 minutes later and said, ‘Ralph, that’s a lot of work.’ He meant it was a brutal car. But he didn’t say ‘Good riddance’ or anything. Then in late ’09, I showed him a video of a Viper breaking the Nürburgring record. He watched all of it and was impressed. I gave him a list of the supercars that the Viper had put away. It’s against the rules here, but we started sketching on the project. We never asked for permission, we just did it. Then, in mid-2010, I had a full-size model put together. We took it to the styling dome and had the place dimly lit like a nightclub, and I got the Chrysler management team sitting almost campfire-style. So we unveiled the car—with its 32-coat candy-apple paint—and you could’ve heard a pin drop. When people started talking, Sergio said, ‘Be quiet! Let’s just take this in.’
“Eventually we got tired of [Chrysler] execs telling us what the car should be,” Gilles remembers, “so we staged a research clinic with supercar owners—Audi R8 owners, Nissan GT-R owners, Porsche and Ferrari folks. They said, ‘The Viper doesn’t handle, it’s only a straight-line wonder, it’s hot inside, it’s badly made, it doesn’t have cruise control.’ It hurt my feelings, but we vowed that the new car would retain its signature rawness and purity, yet we’d bring it into the 21st century.”
Specifications
VEHICLE TYPE: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 3-door hatchback
BASE PRICE (est): $100,000
ENGINE TYPE: pushrod 20-valve V-10, aluminum block and heads, port fuel injection
Displacement: 512 cu in, 8382 cc
TRANSMISSION: 6-speed manual
DIMENSIONS:
Wheelbase: 98.8 in
Length: 175.7 in
Width: 76.4 in Height: 49.1 in
Curb weight: 3350 lb
PERFORMANCE (C/D EST):
Zero to 60 mph: 3.4 sec
Zero to 100 mph: 7.5 sec
¼-mile: 11.4 sec
Top speed: 206 mph
PROJECTED FUEL ECONOMY (C/D EST):
EPA city/highway: 12/21 mpg
Continued…