Last week, Dodge announced a new version of its Viper sports car. The Viper ACR—for American Club Racer—is the best, strongest, fastest version of a machine that is already insanely, impractically capable. And it is a throwback—the last of a kind—to the way every fast car used to be.
The Viper is to automobiles as a nine-pound sledge is to carpentry: too large and brutal for the job, but ridiculously entertaining to wield. It is long and low, with a massive V-10 and a hood the length of an aircraft carrier. With stability control off, keeping a Viper’s rear tires intact is about as possible as building a particle accelerator in your basement.
And then there’s the ACR. It’s all that, and more. The letters are a rarely used Dodge acronym; when applied to a production machine, they signify a car aimed squarely at the track. Unlike some car companies, where performance badges are applied willy-nilly, Chrysler doesn’t throw ACR around. There were two Dodge Neon ACRs, and there have been two previous Viper ACRs. No more.
Nor is the capability mere hype. ACRs typically feature stiffened suspensions, aerodynamic tweaks, minimal options, and other changes that make a car a pain in the ass on the street. Consequently, they sell in microscopic numbers. Dodge doesn’t care, because it’s a halo car for a halo car—a cred-building version of an already low-production machine.
The ACR is also designed to appease Viper Club of America members. According to stereotype, those people are:
1. Fanatical about the car.
2. Wealthy as a Clampett.
3. Built like John Goodman and possessed of multiple top-heavy ex-wives.
4. Half-insane body-building Texas ranchers (anecdotal, but I’ve met two).
5. Crazy for special editions.
VCOA members see the Viper as a religion, and they love track days like nobody else. And the stereotype hints at the car’s personality. Legend holds that the Dodge was designed to be a modern-day Shelby Cobra—big power, big stones, big risk of killing yourself—by a group of men that included Bob Lutz and Carroll Shelby. It’s also a leftover from the 1990s, when automakers still made strange decisions for the sake of cool. In that regard, it’s like the final Toyota Supra Turbo, with its obnoxious wing and extraordinary engine, or BMW’s first-generation M Coupe, which looked like a shoe.
The Viper launched in 1991. The current base model, which makes 645 horsepower, is more technologically advanced than its predecessors. Philosophically speaking, however, it’s the same: enormous engine, simple chassis, many compromises. For the price of a Porsche 911, you get a car that is a hundred times flashier and a hundred times less practical. The 8.4-liter (512 cubic-inch) V-10 sounds like a ‘roided-up truck engine because it is. The basic components—block, crankshaft, cylinder heads—were initially designed for a pickup. The manual gearbox—there has never been a Viper automatic, and hallelujah for that—can be difficult, and first gear will take you north of 60 mph. The interior is noisy and cramped on the best of days. The rocker-mounted exhaust pipes burn legs if you’re not careful getting out. The car didn’t even get electronic stability control until the government decreed it, in 2012.
Vintage-car collector and Shelby Cobra authority Colin Comer bought two first-generation Vipers new. “They were revolutionary for the time, both for what they were and were not,” he says. “The car performed like a Cobra, and it didn’t have crap you didn’t need. But it was also horribly uncomfortable and smelled like a melting plastic factory when it got hot. I lost the convertible top on mine at 100 mph on the first day. There was a loud noise, and then it was gone. It didn’t matter, because the top stunk. But for all the shortcomings, the car was a magnificent beast.”
The car’s roof blew off. And he still liked it.
The modern Viper, though much improved, remains an acquired taste. The interior is claustrophobic. The wheel is in your chest, and the pedals are at the end of a long, narrow alley. Visibility stinks. The whole package seems purposely intimidating.
Also great. Animal. The car looks like a cross between a woman’s leg and a cruise missile. At idle, the engine sounds like a garbage truck consuming a Honda; at full steam, it turns into an apocalyptic thrash that is in no way pleasant or musical. Ride quality is decent, but nothing special. Road noise is deafening in early cars, barely tolerable in later ones. The gearbox is the same Tremec six-speed used in a host of other cars, but something is different about it in the Viper—shifting from one gear to the next requires deliberate effort, as if you were doing something important. The lever feels large and indestructible, virtually begging you to thrash it.
Owners protest when engineers even hint at making the car more livable, and the Viper’s philosophy seems more out of time with every passing year. And yet Chrysler keeps building them. It keeps building them even when the assembly plant has occasionally been idled due to low demand. It keeps building them even though slow sales recently dictated a whopping 15 percent price cut.
Chrysler won’t do this forever, but it’s still doing it now, cheerfully, even willfully, past the point of sanity. The company line paints the car as a tool for boosting brand image. And yet Chrysler’s actions—such as canceling the car’s racing program immediately after a championship win—don’t always back that up.
You couldn’t start a project like this in post-bankruptcy Detroit. You probably couldn’t start it at any other automaker. Even Chrysler’s management has occasionally made noises about ditching the model. But the Viper inspires people, and, like Keith Richards, it seemingly cannot be killed. By way of example, there’s an apocryphal story regarding the current model’s design origin: Early in Chrysler’s bankruptcy troubles, the firm’s designers wondered if they’d have their jobs much longer. With little to do, styling chief Ralph Gilles told those people to sketch the next Viper. Just for grins, mind you, because the car essentially been cancelled.
The sketches were so compelling that Gilles took them up the chain of command. Senior management acquiesced, and the Viper lived on.
Whenever I ask about this story, Chrysler reps change the subject. But the fact that the tale keeps circulating is telling—people want the Viper to have an underdog origin. They want it to be a throwback to the weird old days of the business, when emotion ruled. (The other unkillable rumor holds that the current Viper was meant to be all-new and a platform twin to the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG. When Mercedes and Chrysler split, the Germans gave Auburn Hills the finger, leaving with the SLS. Which might explain why the current Viper is little more than a heavy face-lift of its predecessor. Again, I don’t know if it’s true, but the story’s popularity supports the underdog thing.)
And then there’s the ACR: a compromise, compromised, for the sake of the die-hards. If it’s anything like previous ACR Vipers, it will be equal parts great and painful. The first ACR I met was a 2008 model, brand-new, at California’s Willow Springs Raceway. It was a development mule with a roll bar and racing harnesses, and it gave me my first balls-out laps at America’s oldest permanent road course. In the track’s final turn, a gut-check sweeper where aerodynamic grip is obvious, the ACR caused me to reconsider my relationship with my underwear.
I think of that moment often, usually when I’m bored in traffic. I’m not often nervous in cars, but here, I was tentative, a little spooked. And chiefly, when I climbed out, thrilled to be alive.
That’s the goal. We should be happy the ACR exists, happy it remains a throwback. Like the ordinary Viper, it reminds you that fast cars once existed in spite of our desire to survive. There was a time when climbing off a horse and into a driver’s seat seemed dangerous and stupid—an act to satisfy an urge. And like the best human urges, it got us out the door and into the world in spite of the consequences.
And now, what do we have? Enormously powerful and intelligent new cars, sure. But climate-controlled power seats and 4000-pound curb weights are more common than not. Modern electronics make it difficult for fast cars to fight back. And no automotive engineer worth his SAE membership will agree that speed still takes sacrifice.
These are fine things. But they illustrate how, more than ever, the Viper stands alone.
The Viper may not live forever, but it’s a reminder to appreciate the grand and weird while we have it. And on a personal note, it’s a reminder of how you can love something wonderful but never, ever want to bring it home. Or let it within a five-mile blast radius of your house.
I like Vipers. From the driver’s seat, I might even trust them. Thing is, I don’t trust myself. If I bought a Viper, animal urges would get the better of me. I’d inevitably do something very stupid.
On second thought, maybe that’s exactly why I need one.
