2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon Test Drive

The Demon is the only production car that can lift its front wheels off the ground.  (Dodge)


There’s no better place to test drive the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon than a dragstrip. And there’s no better dragstrip than Atco Dragway in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, a muscle car hotbed and home to the legendary Jersey Devil.

I still had one more question about who is qualified to test drive this demonic vehicle and his name is Gary Gastelu.  Perhaps some of your drag racing gearheads know him from racing circles but I'm not familiar with the name.

Fox News:   2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon test drive


The Demon is the most powerful American car ever made. It has a 6.2-liter supercharged V8 that puts out 808 hp and still gets 22 mph on the highway. It’s an update of the Challenger SRT Hellcat’s 707 hp motor, which now seems quaint — even more so if you fit the Demon with the special engine control module, included in a tool-and-parts kit called the Demon Crate, that allows it to run on 100 octane race gas and bumps the power up to 840 hp to go with its 770 lb-ft of torque.

- Fox

Zen Yogi:  that's madness!

No doubt about it, Yogi, but there's incredible demand for it.

A few other notes on the Challenger’s transformation from Hellcat to Demon. With the project’s goals being a sub-10-second quarter-mile and the ability to lift the front wheels on launch, the SRT team knew it had to trim a few pounds — 232 pounds, it turns out — from the coupe’s over 2-ton weight.

- Fox

No problem with that since Dodge ripped out the passenger seat and rear bench seat.


The interested gearhead student is invited to read the article for the detail on how the Demon achieved the project goal of a sub-ten second quarter mile speed and how it felt for Gary Gastelu in trying to achieve that in his test drive.


Meanwhile, the specs:

2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon

Base price: $86,060

Type: 1- to 5-passenger, 2-door, rear-wheel-drive coupe

Engine: 6.2-liter supercharged V8

Power: 808/840 hp, 770 lb-ft

Transmission: 8-speed automatic

MPG: 13 city/22 highway

- Fox

There's one excellent piece of information in that since eighty-six grand is way too expensive for the dingbat hotrodders in their Ford trucks and they're endlessly irritating in this neck of the woods.

Zen Yogi:  this car looks absolutely useless.  Even if I impress the girls with this car, I can't give one a ride since she doesn't even get a fuckin' seat!

There's no argument on that from the Rockhouse since here we believe the biggest tell with a car is in what happens when you put it sideways in a corner.  For the Demon, there's probably not much for it except throw your hands in the air and hope the crash pillows work.

Zen Yogi:  those Mustangs you loathe so much do a prime job of handling corners, mate

That's true, Yogi, and it probably saves some of those young hotrodders from getting dead in them but who knows what miracle keeps alive the ones in their hotrod trucks.


Dodge is building only 3,300 of them for the U.S. and Canada, and they’ve all been allocated. It did its best to keep dealers from marking them up, but some people are already trying to flip cars they don’t have yet for double what they’re paying, and a few probably will. If not now, then in a few years at one of those collector car auctions on TV.

- Fox

There's something twisted when any car goes directly from the sales floor to becoming an extremely-expensive collector's item since this makes us wonder what purpose this car ever serves.  There's no excess of Rockhouse cynicism in play where we have always fancied high-performance vehicles and driving them well but Yogi is right with this one:  it's madness.

Zen Yogi:  it might be a good getaway vehicle when I'm stealing pic-a-nic baskets!

Oh sure, Yogi, since this looks like it easily qualifies for stealth since there's no chance anyone would hear you, right?