‘Merica - land of the free, home of the brave, and producer of the most outrageous drag racers ever conceived. Proof in point - the new Hennessey Demon, a street-legal destroyer of tires that’ll blow the doors off just about anything with actual doors.
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The Full Story
In case you were unaware, Hennessey Performance is an American tuner based out of Sealy, Texas, best known for producing some of the most ridiculously overpowered four-wheeled machines on the planet, including the Lotus Exige-based Hennessey Venom GT, and more recently, the even-faster Hennessey Venom F5.
With a resumé like that, you can probably imagine what happens when these boys get their hands on a Dodge Challenger SRT Demon.
To help illustrate the point, Hennessey released the above-featured video. Although it’s just 2 minutes, 15 seconds in length, the clip speaks volumes, offering up copious shots of the HP-tweaked Demon doing its thing at the drag strip - you know, like performing burnouts, lining up on the tree, and laying down all its prodigious output on the 1320 on its way to a 9.14 at 152 mph.
Yep, you read that right. It’ll also hit 60 mph from a standstill in a mind-blowing 1.9 seconds.
To achieve numbers like those, the car is equipped with the tuner’s HPE1000 package, which includes a 4.5-liter supercharger, bringing a significant boost over the stock 2.7-liter unit. It also tosses in new stainless steel long-tube headers, a new air induction system, a new throttle body, a new fuel pump, and new injectors, as well as a custom ECU tune to make it all work just right.
The result of all these tweaks and tunes is 1,035 horsepower at 6,500 rpm and 948 pound-feet of torque at 4,200 rpm, which Hennessey Performance says is computes to 880 wheel horsepower after factoring in the parasitic loss from the automatic transmission.
As a reminder, the Dodge Demon comes from the factory with a maximum of 840 horsepower at the crank, running a 9.65 quarter mile time at 140 mph and doing the 0-to-60 mph shimmy in 2.3 seconds.
“The 2018 Demon is a street-legal rocket from Dodge, but we wanted to take the car’s impressive track times to an industry leading level,” said the company’s founder and president, John Hennessey, in a press release. “Over the past several months we have worked to develop a low 9 seconds drag car that our customers car drive to the track, put on an impressive show with blistering 1/4 mile times, and then drive home in complete comfort.”
Of course, it bears mentioning that the package does not include a roll cage, a necessary item under current NHRA regulation when running 9’s. So while you could bring this thing to the track, you’d get thrown out after just one run. Bummer.
That said, if you still want the fastest Demon in the world, make sure to grab yours now, as only 50 units will be produced. Each example also comes with a few nice small touches, such as Hennessey-branded exterior badging, serial numbered plaques, and Hennessey-branded floor mats. Incredibly, Hennessey is also offering all this goodness in conjunction with a 1-year, 12,000-mile limited warranty. That’s confidence, right there.
References
Read our full review on the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon.
Read more Dodge news.