Hennessey Performance Engineering is at it again. The company has been in the spotlight as of late with the string of lawsuits that have emerged over undelivered and unfinished Dodge Vipers. According to some people, giving your money to Hennessey is like throwing it away.
But now it seems that Hennessey is courting another Dodge crowd, the folks who are driving their brand new Dodge Challengers. Hennessey is calling it the HPE600 Turbo. That "600" stands for a claimed 620 horsepower and 650 pound-feet of peak torque! A healthy 200hp boost over the stock SRT8’s 420hp.
Starting with a Challenger SRT8, the heart of the system is a massive Garrett ball-bearing turbocharger. Hennessey then polishes the 6.1-liter Hemi V8’s cylinder heads and drops the compression ratio down from 10.3:1 to 9.6:1 to be able to handle the massive boost pressure. Custom headers feed the big turbo that then pushes its charge through an air-to-air intercooler and back into the engine. Oversize fuel injectors keep the combustion chambers soaked in high-test race fuel while a 3-inch-diameter stainless-steel dual-exhaust system handles waste gases.
Strap on a set of drag slicks and head to your local drag strip where you will be able to post 11.9 second quarter mile times all day long. To give you a performance guage, the new 2009 Porsche 911 Turbo runs the same distance in about 11.7 seconds, while weighing about 1,000 pounds less. So it’s really fast then. Hennessey-branded 20-inch deep-dish five-spoke wheels are fitted, while the classic graphics push remind people that this is a fun muscle car. Hennessey also lowers the car a bit with revised suspension and upgrades the brakes with StopTech components.
Pricing is yet to be announced, but expect it to be mega. Just make sure Hennessey has the time to finish it. In this case, I bet a lawyer would be even more expensive.
Liars! Its got 640 horsepower.
