COURTESY ROAD & TRACK & YAHOO NEWS
I just spent a week with a Dodge Challenger, and it helped me recalibrate some internal stuff. It reminded me that, as much as we here at the magazine and website love cars, sometimes we get caught up in the fussy stuff. The dickering over the weight balance and the merits of aero packages with carbon-fiber splitters, single-scroll turbos versus, well, whatever.
The Challenger I borrowed was the 392 Hemi Scat Pack Shaker, which is rather a fussy name come to think of it. But what it delivers is delightfully unfussy: the kind of visceral delights which got us into cars in the first place.
But let's start out with the things that the car is not. It is not a sports car. The Challenger in any V8 form is husky and so nose-heavy that it feels like there's a Honda Civic sitting on the hood.
One doubts that the word "lightening" has ever been applied to the car, and its suspension, though improved with the Scat Pack's performance version, is workaday. Try to manage the car over a technical off-camber turn, and it wallows like a drunken harbor seal.
One doubts that the word "lightening" has ever been applied to the car, and its suspension, though improved with the Scat Pack's performance version, is workaday. Try to manage the car over a technical off-camber turn, and it wallows like a drunken harbor seal.
Tip-in most often results in the hood tipping upwards, and the philosophy is that traction is not a thing to be managed, but to be overcome. The Challenger doesn't ride on rails, the car doesn't shrink around you the faster you go, and it doesn't feel all that planted.
Here's what the Challenger is: Cheating on your taxes (a little). Being a few minutes late and not apologizing for it. It is telling your mom that's she's being annoying when she actually is. It is refusing to check your work e-mail after 5:30. It is the realization that being in polite society often means bending, if just a little, in most situations.
The Challenger is a petrol bath for pent-up souls.
The Challenger is a riposte to all that. An encouragement to a little (but not totally illegal) bad behavior. A petrol bath for pent-up souls. A truly American muscle car.
At a price starting at more than $44,000, the Scat Pack is not a car for angry teenagers. The buyer is likely to be 50 or older, and you know what? That's exactly who should buy it. Because that's the guy who has probably done right by society and his boss and his spouse and family for a long time, and all that good behavior has earned him the wherewithal to buy rebellion in the form of a 485-hp, 6.4-liter V8. Let's let him revel in the fact that Scat Pack sounds dirty in a rather, well, scatological kind of way.
And let's talk about the Hellcat. That 707-hp car is more of more, and I've never driven one and not had a good time. But I don't think you need to spend the extra money or burn the extra gas. In the end you can do the same type of low-level, amoral activities with the 392 Hemi, or hell, the $32,000 R/T.
The Challenger is rebelling even when it's just sitting there. Oversized and attitudinal and not even a little bit grown up. When Dodge first brought it back, they didn't try to find a balance between the old and the modern. They just went ahead and ripped off all the good stuff from the old. And since most things modern on the roads look boring as hell, the Challenger is a win. It is a bad 1970s detective TV show, walrus mustaches and all, writ into metal.
It is a bad 1970s detective TV show, walrus mustaches and all, writ into metal.
And while the size might work against it on a racetrack, in the real world you can stuff four or even five people into it. First thing I did was take out my 3-and-a-half-year old son in his car seat. Later, in front of my wife, he said, "Dad, let's do another smoky burnout!" But shouldn't every little one learn a bit about rebellion inside a Challenger?
That extends to teenagers, too. My neighbor's son just turned 16, and he was having his birthday party. I brought over the car in all its Plum Crazy arraignment-the loudest purple you've ever seen-and gave rides. Four passengers at a time, like a traveling carnival. Teenage boys and girls and their parents.
Pretty soon everyone had piled in for at least a loop around our backwoods roads-sometimes twice. I started taking different routes lest the nearest other neighbors (who didn't get invited) get annoyed. It's hard to be discrete in a vivid purple muscle car.
Pretty soon everyone had piled in for at least a loop around our backwoods roads-sometimes twice. I started taking different routes lest the nearest other neighbors (who didn't get invited) get annoyed. It's hard to be discrete in a vivid purple muscle car.
And if I did roust a few of the locals, should I feel terrible about it? The entire point of the Challenger is to encourage a little bad behavior. To skirt uniformity and tweak a few boundaries and paint the asphalt at a lonely intersection with double stripes.
After all, a car-loving boy only gets a 16th birthday once. Then he'll probably have to wait until his 50s to regain that feeling all over again-in a muscle car of his own.
Jason Harper, a contributing editor to Road & Track, has tested and written on cars for two decades. His scariest drive was a rally race in an original Lancia 037, his first drive of a supercar was the Porsche Carrera GT, and the only time he's gotten a speeding ticket was in a base Mini Cooper. His column, Harper's Bizarre, runs every Wednesday.
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