No matter what happens with Dodge muscle cars from 2024 onwards, the 2023 Dodge Demon 170, with its official quarter-mile time of 8.91s, was born a legend. We can now show you one of the first customer Demon 170 1/4-mile runs, which brings the missing piece of the official unveiling, namely the ET (elapsed time) and trap speed numbers.
Dodge has done a tremendous job of keeping the future of its muscle cars a secret. So outside of the confirmed 2024 unveiling for an all-electric muscle car, the automaker has managed to keep a lid on all the rumors about the 2024 Charger also getting ICE versions powered by Stellantis’ new Hurrican twin-turbo straight-six already found on production models from Jeep and Ram.
Heck, even with a 2024 Charged body leak showing what appears to be a transmission tunnel, which would confirm the arrival of an internal combustion engine, there’s no official info to quench our gas thirst.
Until the calendar forces Dodge to spill the beans on how they wish to conduct their muscle car business, we still have some Demon 170 details to unearth, the kind we discussed in the intro.
For one, if you’re unfamiliar with this Mopar monster, you may be wondering why it has a base price of $100,361 ($96,666 MSRP, plus $1,595 destination charge and $2,100 gas guzzler tax) and has seen ridiculous dealer markups pushing the price to three times as much. So let’s see what the Challenger Mack Daddy is all about!
Dodge Demon 170 1/4-mile time in the real world
In what is probably the first fully documented 1/4-mile run (think: with numbers) of the Dodge Demon 170, this king of Challengers did it in 9.39s, with a trap speed of 147.73 mph.
And while it may not seem like it to people outside the drag strip realm, those figures are a far cry from the Demon 170’s official quarter-mile performance of 8.91s at 151 mph, at least as what your eyes would tell you, aka the gap.
Still, it’s mighty impressive for a production vehicle to be able to achieve such numbers out of the box and this is precisely how things went with the original SRT Demon, with its 9.65s official 1/4-mile time, came along in 2017.
Meanwhile, the old car has allowed owners to reach its full potential and so will the Demon 170. After all, we’re talking about a 6.2L HEMI V8 that borrows the Hellephant crate engine’s 3.0L supercharger for an output of 1,025 hp and 945 lb-ft. These figures are offered when the engine runs on E85, which is precisely what happened during the said run. Speaking of which, here’s a Hellephant-swapped Chrysler 300 drag racing a Lamborghini Aventador with an ending that will make you question supercar prices.
Besides, the tech required to put all that muscle down via the Demon 170’s Mickey Thompson P315/50R17 ET Street R drag radials can be tuned for performance that not only matches but bests the official figuresโthat’s what aftermarket developer Ripatuned, who ran the car, explained.
“There is a ton of torque management in this transmission from the factory and with tuning I believe there is a ton on the table on the engine and trans side. The transmission calibation is firm but the shifts are rather slow from the factory,” Ripatuned stated in a Facebook post.
In essence, this is the tuner’s development car and with the company already suspecting the Demon 170 engine actually makes more than 1,025 crank horsepower, you can expect great things from the Sublime-finished example.