We've all had that dream. The one where you grab the wheel with both fists, flex every muscle in your body, then unleash hell with your right foot. With each throw of the shifter, you drift deeper into the sounds, smells and endorphins of pure bad-assness. I usually wake up just after the almighty fourth-gear power-shift as my alarm clock belts out the Top Gun anthem.
I get the whole muscle car thing. As a kid, my two favorite race cars were a truck named Gravedigger and a sprint car that everyone called The Tamale Wagon. Both had big, stadium-rocking engines. When the Viper came out in 1992, it had that same appeal. The 8.0-liter V10-powered roadster, with its massive tires and side-exit tailpipes, was clearly engineered to impress, and it did.
So what if its two-valve-per-cylinder engine weighed over 700 pounds and was designed for a Dodge Ram? Nobody cared if it borrowed front suspension components from a Dakota pickup. The Viper was the hero car dealers desperately needed to draw customers to their showrooms. How else were they going to get people to test-drive dismal Dodge Colts?
The people at Mitsubishi had a different plan for marketing their Colt, known domestically as the Lancer. They stuffed it with the guts from a Galant VR-4 and campaigned it in the World Rally Championship. To meet homologation requirements, a certain number of similarly equipped Lancers had to be sold to the public. Hence, just as American dealers were receiving their first Vipers, the special-edition '92 Lancers started appearing in Japan. Each came with a turbocharged 2.0-liter 4G63 engine, all-wheel-drive and the name Lancer Evolution.
The success of the Evolution program has been documented extensively in SCC. Most readers are familiar with what a mildly tuned Evo is capable of. But other than the reputations of their massive engines and megalomaniac owners, Vipers are quite foreign to us. The last ones we tested were entered in the second and third Ultimate Street Car Challenges. The ACR edition-driven by the late, great Paul Mumford-kicked ass, but its successor floundered.
Those chassis are now two generations old. We needed to get into one of the new fourth-gens to make sure the (frequent) cheap shots we take are still justified. So off we went to our test track with a brand new '08 Viper SRT10 Coupe. To make things interesting, we brought an Evo to run against it. While this shootout may have sounded absurd back in that Dodge showroom 15 or so years ago, a fight between big brother and the Colt's grown-up cousin now makes sense.
Over the years, the Viper has gone through several evolutions of its own. The dual side-exit exhausts went away for a while, but they're back now. The handling should be better than before, thanks to aluminum control arms and knuckles. The brakes have Brembo calipers and 14-inch rotors at each corner. And while the hardtop chassis has added around 150 pounds, the motor has lost almost that much.
That leaves the new car with more structural rigidity and better weight distribution. The all-aluminum 'Copperhead' V10 still breathes through 20 valves, but they've grown slightly and, with the addition of variable valve timing, the heads move a lot more air. With a block that's up to 8.4 liters, the engine is now rated at 600bhp and 560 lb-ft of torque. I couldn't wait to see how much of that power the 345-section Michelins can handle.