Editor’s Note (and Disclaimer): Like Socotra House LLC commentator Arrias, Marlow is a real human being and not just another manifestation of my alternate personalities. The Quacks have put me back on meds and all that seems to be just fine. I have been a car nut all my life, starting with my first speeding ticket (120mph in a 50-zone) while I was still on my learner’s permit. Marlow has combined the thrill of crotch-rocket two-wheeling with the most amazing ride to come out of the Dodge Brother’s MOPAR shop in decades. Fasten your seat-blet and take a real ride with Marlow today.
– Vic
The Enchanting Song of the Bad and All Powerful Kitty
Coastal Empire
There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a Tor-Red, hunch-back, warp-speed Dodge Challenger Hellcat is one of them – but I wanted one anyway, and on many days now two years after I bought it, I actually believe I still need one. That is why they are dangerous.
Many American males own fast cars at some point during their lives. Some go 120 miles per hour on freeways in them. The foolhardy do so on two lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks, patrol cars and stupid critters that might get in the way.
You have to be a little crazy to drive these super horse powered (the Hellcat has 707 of them), high-speed missiles anywhere except a drag strip. Even there, these cars will scare the sniveling shit out of you. Upon reflection, there’s not much difference between rear ending a semi on the freeway or exiting the drag strip runout sideways at 130 MPH.
There have been days in my life when I got what I wanted, and on others, I got what I needed. This story is about both. At the same time.
The Dodge dealer in northern Indiana called me in March 2015 to ask when I could pick up this red beauty after some earlier email exchanges and many tens of thousands of dollars being overnighted to him. I got giddy. As he prattled on at the other end of the phone, my mind got lost on quarter mile times in the low 10s, trap speeds above 125, and freeway test speed runs in excess of 200. It seemed like a chic decision at the time (I was two weeks shy of 66), and my surviving friends in the fast car world would be very excited. “Hot damn!” I could hear them they say. “We’ll take it to the track and blow them all away.”
My dreamy response was simple.
“Eff that! Screw the strip. That’s for sissies. We are gonna road race this sucker against any and all comers. Let those fast and furious weasels eat tire smoke.”
I had been a connoisseur of fast cars and motorcycles all my life. But college, a wife and a daughter intervened in the late 1960s. So I settled for a series of screamingly fast bikes –Triumph with a 750 TT kit, Kawasaki and Suzuki triples. I rode in freeway traffic doing wheelies, lost them lowside on crappy decreasing radius turns cracking several helmets, and avoided various cars trying to kill me for decades. I am not without scars on my brain and my body from those motorcycle days, but I lived with them and survived and accommodated their after-effects.
Back then, road racing, whether in a car or on a bike, was sometimes about going way too fast for conditions and somehow making it out alive. It was where you sat on the side of the road just shaking and wondering how you made it through that, and how that turned into “if I had cranked the front wheels a bit more and applied a bit more brake to adjust my drift, I could have gone a little faster and quicker. Kind of like busting your personal best time on a twisty piece of road, just to see another car enter the other end. Somehow you got past the car without crashing, and then when you realized that you were still alive.
Road racers were a different breed back in the day. You see we had very different things we valued in fast cars and bikes. Pure speed in top gear on a drag strip was one thing, but pure speed in third gear in down or up hill hairpin turns was quite another.
We craved it. Road racing was strictly a matter of taste. It took a primeval mentality, an abnormal mixture of high speed, 100% unadulterated stupid, and an unquestioning commitment to road racing and all its dangerous pleasures. It was one of my finest albeit short-lived addictions.
It was about to acquire another addictive substance again.
When the Hellcat came into my sights in the dealer’s garage four weeks later, I knew what to do with it. We had taken several days off to fly north, collect the beast, and drive it back down south to Key West.
As we screwed on the Florida license plate (HELQAT), the salesman explained the need for two different key fobs – one black and one red. Of course, I thought, “You don’t want to cripple unsuspecting parking lot attendants or dealer mechanics with too much power, so you give them the 500 HP black fob when you left them to care for your beast.”
When I got behind the wheel and lit the fuse of this fiery red, four-wheeled rocket ship in the garage, I realized I was back in the road-racing and scare-myself-shitless business.
The engine grumble at idle was amazing, while the growl as the accelerator pedal was depressed was awe inspiring. I was filled with feelings of lust every time I stomped on the go-pedal. I knew that others would feel the same way.
My dreams continued as the engine idled . . . my southernmost driveway would quickly become a magnet for drooling gearheads. They would quarrel and bitch about who would be the first to help me evaluate this new toy. And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this car. Subconsciously, I also felt their presence in the car as passengers would keep me from doing something mega stupid.
When aimed in the right direction at high speed, I immediately found the Hellcat had almost supernatural capabilities. This I accidentally discovered as I drove it south from the dealership on a two lane Indiana county road. I was following a slow moving car doing a sedate 55 mph and pulled out to pass while giving the Hellcat what I thought was a little oompph on the go-pedal. This red devil fishtailed as it launched itself around the slow moving car. Somehow the demon straightened out as I backed off the throttle. By the time I pulled back over into the proper lane it was starting to decelerate below 90.
This was not a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary if only to teach me to baby the accelerator with my toes and not my sole or heel. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as the car screamed past anything provided that my jaws and eyes were not clamped down shut in fear. To do otherwise was to come face to face with the Death Machine. I never wanted that queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach again nor to silently cry for my mama. When pulling off to gas the beast up somewhere around Indianapolis, I went into a trance for 60 seconds or so while pumping gas until I was finally able to light a cigarillo and calm down enough to get back behind the wheel again and drive.
After a brief stay with family in our central Ohio hometown, we pointed the Bad and All Powerful Kitty southward. W wanted to take certain interstates that would get us home quickly. I had other plans that I revealed as turns were made that took us into the far southeastern corner of Tennessee.
As I turned onto US 129, I shared the rest of my plan. Tail of the Dragon. Uphill attack. Spring had not sprung, so we could see through not-yet-leafed-trees turns to spot oncoming traffic.
I had ridden this road many times on motorcycles since the early 70s but never in a muscle or super car. It was late in the day, so the road would be mostly clear. And it was.
On advice of counsel, I can’t say how fast we went, but I did set a new personal best (PB) time for an uphill climb.
Suitably sated, we took our time and made it safely home the next day, but not before W wound BaAP Kitty out past 135 on a deserted twenty mile stretch of I95 in Florida. While headed south my road racing dreaming continued.
A NASCAR track and NHRA dragstrip were 130 miles north in Homestead Florida. No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar, super horsepower-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in the Florida Keys. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through tourist season-gridlocked traffic along US 1 whenever we feel like it. For that we need a Death Machine.
The Hellcat is a finely engineered machine. Once in its new home, my neighbors hailed it as beautiful and admired its racing lines. The sucker looked like it was going 80 when it was standing still in the driveway.
Taking friends and assorted speed freaks for a road test drive in the beast, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience for all my first time passengers. They had never felt instantaneous power, neck breaking acceleration and speed like this. Just past Mile Marker 5 where Boog Powell’s Marina used to be, we would be heading north on a straight two mile long stretch of divided highway along US 1 doing 60-65, when I told them to hold on. Two plus seconds later we were rocketing past 110. The local fuzz knew me and the car by sight. They knew where and what I was doing, but never hassled me. That was because I gave a number of them test rides. A couple of southbound FHP patrol cars flashed their lights, when they spotted me on one of my runs, but never gave chase.
They all loved the torque, the true deadly element of this beast that you got when you strapped this monster on and hammered the accelerator. BOOM! Instant take-off. No screeching or squawking around like a fool. Just an outrageous roar and the supercharger spooling up as our minds were completely emptied of everything but fear.
This rocket dug right in and shot us straight down the road, for better or worse, good or ill . . . until the Death Machine did you depart.
Somewhere north of 130 is where the Hellcat got its second wind. That’s when the supercharger whine became prominent and a second acceleration thump was felt. Sorta like an afterburner engaging. I never got the electronic shift to go higher than 6th on these runs. The Hellcat has 8 gears.
This would be a shameful admission for an all-out road racer, but let me tell you something: Bad and All Powerful Kitty is simply too damn fast to drive at its top speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you have about a guaranteed mile of clear and completely straight and level freeway ahead to roar down the centerline with your hair on fire and a full throated Yahhhhh! as you pass 190.
Now when I drive the Hellcat, I try to do so with a more calculated sanity. The emergence of the 21st century supercars has drastically heightened the need for this approach. Automotive technology has made huge leaps forward. Take the Hellcat. With this banshee’s optimum cruising speed at well over 110, seeing a bambi in the middle of the road as you round a gentle sweeper turn . . . WHAMMO. Meet the Death Machine.
The Hellcat is so finely engineered, balanced and torqued that you can do 90 mph in fourth through a 35 zone and get away with it. The car is not just fast – it is ungodly quick and responsive. It is like driving something, which will outrun a modern jet fighter in the quarter mile on the runway, but in the end, the jet would go airborne and the Hellcat would not. Hello, Death Machine.
There are fundamental differences between the old muscle cars of my 1960s youth and the current breed of supercars. These new beasts are gifted with overspec’ed race car quality braking, steering and on-the-fly tunable exhaust and suspension. Yet, should you drive them for any length of time at top speed, you will almost certainly die just like road racers did back in the 60s. The new supercar road racer macho might not be about winning a race but more like Do you have the balls to drive your bottomless pit of horse power past the edge longer than I will mine?
Whatever the answer might be, on some days this car is in my opinion the most fun you can have with your clothes on. This type of bloodcurdling fun has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. Yes, even at 68 years of age. On my tombstone they will carve, “LAUNCH HIM!”
So far, no one has offered or even discussed road racing theirs against mine.
Copyright © 2017 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com