How a Bunch of Rebels Built a Killer Supercar

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Why are we as Americans so damn American? We're loud, arrogant, clumsy, difficult, dangerous, backwards in so many ways. Yet, arguably, the United States has risen to become the leaders of the free world. That might just be because our nation was built upon rebellion in 1775. We rebelled against the British Empire. A ragtag group of criminals standing up to colonizers, securing our right to be free. In 1920, we rebelled against prohibition. An entire nation made into outlaws. A spirit of ingenuity instilled among our people, all in the name of getting sheetfaced. In 1969, we even rebelled against gravity, breaking the shackles of our planet, erecting our flag upon alien soil just to be the first. carving in stone Our names for all time. And in 1991, it all culminated in one very American act, almost as a caricature of America itself. A car was unleashed upon the world that didn't care. With smoke, sound, power and a death wish. The Dodge Viper rebelled against the very concept of boredom brash, loud and wildly unsafe. The Viper was unlike anything the world had ever seen. It was Kentucky Bourbon poured into a gasoline engine, an angst ridden teenager with a gas pedal and a death wish. A guitar plugged into an amp and cranked to 11 piercing ears and shattering windows. It was America and it was brilliant. No safety, no rules, no limits. It was yours to control if you dared. It was freedom. Freedom to be irresponsible. To grip the wheel of something untamed. And risk life and limb just for the experience. A car built by a team of dedicated mad men whose blood pumped of gasoline, hillbillies and bush mechanics, moonshiners, working without oversight on a singular goal. Revive the spirit of America. Legends who would go on to become redneck rock stars. This is the story of rebels of criminals in corporate suits who came together to save America and build the Dodge Viper. Picture an expensive car like the Bugatti Veyron, a $2 million masterpiece, or its predecessor, the McLaren F1 valued at over $20 million today. Neither, though, is worth as much as a stunning depiction of an automobile. In 2013, Andy Warhol's silver car crash was sold for a whopping $105 million. Crazy. Or is it? You see, Art, fine art, like Warhols in certain cases can increase in value by incredible amounts, even more than some stocks. And as anyone that invests will tell you, a diverse portfolio is important. And with today's volatile markets, contemporary art’s low correlation to stocks and bonds means your money is wisely invested. But you can't afford to buy a nine figure painting, and you probably can't afford to store it and keep it safe. Enter Masterworks a platform that allows you to add valuable pieces of art to your portfolio without needing to own a museum Banksy, Picasso, Warhol all within reach. So far in 2022, masterworks has sold five paintings, the last three returning 17, 21 and 33% net to their investors. Masterworks has over 575,000 members and files each of their paintings with the SEC. And thanks to their performance this year, Masterworks even has a waitlist. But today you can skip the list and join the Masterworks portfolio. All you need to do is follow the link in the description. And now back to the show. Look you know the drill, before I tell you about what you came to see, we’ve got to go back in time a little bit. It's 1962 and a man from Texas has just created a machine unlike anything the world had ever seen. Light as a feather with no roof. Two seats, two doors and unheard of power. It was his first and arguably most important creation. He called it the CSX 2000. You or I might call it a Cobra. That cowboy, of course, was Carroll Shelby. Now, Shelby probably needs his own video. There's zero chance I'm going to do justice here, but I'll do my best. Long story. Very short. Shelby flew warplanes, owned a dump truck, worked on an oil derrick, started a chicken farm and began racing in the big leagues starting in the 1950s. Carroll Shelby was the quintessential postwar American man. And that man had a singular dream to build some really goddamn fast racing cars. To hear him tell it, he only became a race car driver just to learn about how they worked. And from his experience driving those race cars around the world, he saw one massive problem. America, in the late fifties and early sixties, had no proper sports cars. Sure, we had the Corvette, but this was back before the Corvette was good. No, in Shelby's eyes, America was missing an all purpose all-American sports car that you could race on the weekend. The car to take on Ferrari and Aston Martin, to put an American on the podium. So he said fork it, he'd build one himself. Now, he wasn't much of a mechanic, but due to his personality and racing history, he knew how to assemble and lead a team. People who knew how to build a car all following the winning formula. Less weigh, and more power. The featherweight came from the AC Ace, a fiberglass and aluminum sports car from England that was going out of production. Its engine, though, was a total disappointment. So power would come from Ford, who were on the cusp of releasing a new lightweight, small block V8. Thankfully, Shelby had an in at Ford. Lee Iacocca, the son of an immigrant who worked his way from hot dog chef to vice president of Ford, where he was responsible for the Mustang. You know, the most important car Ford produced since the Model T, he also saved Dodge from going belly up. But we'll get to that later. Shelby approached Iacocca with a simple request. Give me 25 grand and a boatload of engines to sell it, Shelby planted an idea in Iaccoca’s head. This would be a Ford powered car that would crush Chevy's new darling Corvette. I don't think anyone actually believed Shelby could do it. But Iacocca is a man that loves a good underdog story and loves a good sports car. So Shelby got his seed money and some brand spanking new Ford V-8’s to play with. What they built was the Carroll Shelby experimental, but thanks to a name that came to him in a dream, it was a released as the Cobra in 1962. It was wildly unsafe incredibly fast, had no roof and stop me if this sounds kind of familiar. It would absolutely kill an inexperienced driver. That might sound terrible to you, but you see, this was an American car for American people. And when we hear that something's a bad idea or it's dangerous. Well, we just got to give it a go. So the Cobra ignited a fire in the heart of every speed junky in the 1960s. Its raw power and unhinged behavior was the perfect blend, a sort of freedom personified and placed upon four wheels. Shelby's cobra is simply one of the greatest cars ever created. You only need to look at how often it's replicated to know this to be true. It's one of the most sought after drooled over and romanticized cars ever made. And it was the spark that set off the burning flames of American cars in the early sixties. That is right before the seventies came along and they all turned to sheet What do you do if your biggest gift to the world is giant gas guzzling V8s and suddenly gas becomes basically unobtainable? Panic. You panic. And that's what happened to the US during the oil crisis. We entered the malaise era. A period of American awfulness. Cars so ugly, so bland and revolting that it nearly killed the industry as a whole. Japan and Europe had been prepared for this disaster with their small, fuel efficient cars flying out of dealerships. But America got left in the dust and none of the Big Three could figure out how to cope. Ford built well... The Pinto. Chevy just flat out forgot how to build cars. And Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy. Enter Lee Iacocca, who, due to some political shenanigans, was now in charge of Chrysler, Dodge and Plymouth. At the time, Chrysler wanted the government to save them from bankruptcy. Yeah, 2008 wasn't the first time that we the people, paid our hard earned money to save poorly managed car companies. So in the late seventies, when Chrysler asked for a handout, the nation had one condition. They had to have a plan. Chrysler needed to be able to prove that they weren't jumping out of the pot and into the fire. Lee Iacocca had a few ideas. First, he would expand Chrysler's influence by snatching up other companies like AMC and Lamborghini and share resources between the companies to lower development costs. Then he would cut spending relentlessly and kill any department that wasn't making money. Neither of these things would be enough, though. So Iacocca unveiled the final piece of his plan. Simply change the way that cars are made forever. Sometimes even a bad idea can have a positive effect. Or, to put it more bluntly, some truly terrible cars can lead to an automotive revolution. Look, I simply can't overstate how important Iacocca is in car history, not just to enthusiasts like you and I. But there's a direct effect on John Q Public. Revolutionary is almost an understatement. Iacocca's vision was that Chrysler would build a line of cars all on the same platform. This revolutionary idea was known as the K car. A simple front wheel drive box that could be reworked to fill any role. You slap panels on it, and it's a family hauling station wagon called the Reliant dropped the top instrument and would and you have the executive LeBaron turbo charged it and you have something that kind of looks like a sports car from a distance. You may notice that this is how pretty much every car is done now. Companies develop one platform and that platform gets shared by a ton of makes and models. But in 1979, it was a completely novel concept. Chevy basically only made two cars after being inspired by the K car, the Corvette and everything else. Nissan made one car in 2003, and while it's still making that car love it or hate it, this essentially saved American cars as a whole to compete with the Japanese. American car companies could now sell an affordable car to everyone who needed one and take home a giant stack of cash to boot. And it was just in time for the eighties, a time when nearly everyone was struggling to afford a car. Now, look, the k cars were not amazing vehicles. They were slow. Front wheel drive turds that fell apart if you left them in the sun too long. But they were exactly what America needed at the time. Dodge had gone from the hero of the people in the sixties to self-immolating in the seventies, but powered by whiney buzzy four bangers in pop metal boxes, they clawed their way out of the red and set the standard for American automobile manufacturers. And thanks to that idea and the help of another iconic automotive dreamer, America started to put up a fight. As American cars went through a rollercoaster of failures and successes. A marine pilot named Bob Lutz had gotten out of the service and stepped into the role of VP of Sales for BMW, a German company with questionable ownership that made slow luxury cars for slow luxury people. Lutz hated slow cars, though. In fact, the parallels between Shelby and Lutz are hard to ignore. Both started as pilots. Love the smell of gasoline and burnt rubber and dreamed of creating the ultimate driver's cars. So Lutz's vision for the German company was simple create the ultimate driving machine. No, really. That was his idea. Before Lutz, BMW had the 2002 a great car, but not exactly a hot ticket item. When it came time to replace the 2002 BMW intended on ditching their iconic kidney bean grilles and making a knockoff Mercedes-Benz, Lutz had a better idea. Keep the grilles. Continue to use numbers instead of names. And oh, yeah. Make the cars fun to drive. During his tenure, he would drive the development of the three series and lay the groundwork for one of the most famous letters in all of automotive history. M. After successfully rewriting BMW Future, Lutz returned to the States to punish Ford for going all in on the Pinto and helped create the Mark three escort, a.k.a. Ford's Group B icon. By the time he left Ford to join his friend Iacocca as an executive at Chrysler, Lutz had learned a few things about making fast cars. The problem, of course, is that Chrysler just didn't make fast cars. They made K cars Lutz was not about to let that continue though. Being a gearhead through and through. Lutz's personal car was a replica of the iconic Shelby Cobra 427. He pulled the Ford badges off of it and drove it to work to show it off to one of Chrysler's lead designers, a guy named Tom Gale, a third generation engineer with a need for speed who's itching to work on something exciting. Lutz shows Gale, one of America's last great heroes, a shining example of what American men spit and fought and drank too much of when America still dreamed of conquering the world. And in the parking lot of a company that produced automotive boredom, Lutz turns to Gale and says, I'm sick of uninspiring bullsheet. We need to build one of these. The Cobra certainly made an impression. In the weeks following their meeting, Gale spent his evenings carving a design from clay. Smooth muscled lines began to take shape, a long protruding nose to hold a massive power plant. A sleek, low profile akin to the Jaguar E-Type, designed from the beginning to be roofless A true spiritual successor to the Shelby Cobra. Gale was inspired. He knew they were on to something. This clay model simply had to come to life. All he needed was to convince the man who could make it happen. Gale showed the model to Lutz, whose heart began to race, perhaps like at BMW This was the moment to revive a dying brand with something as profound and intoxicating as the Shelby 427 Cobra, a car that America had fallen in love with decades past. That simple meeting of the minds was enough. Lutz got to work assembling Team Viper in secret from Dodge's truck department. He brought on Frncois Castaing, a Parisian man with a penchant for bending the rules who cut his teeth, building engines for the 24 hours of Le Mans He stole Dick Winkles from the Performance Division, who'd been working on Lamborghini engines at the time and of course had the best name. And he recruited an engineer named Roy Sjoberg Sjoberg was new to Dodge, but his last boss was a guy named Zora Arkus-Duntov the brain behind the Corvette. sjoberg sent out word that he would need his own team of engineers and mechanics, and he had his pick of more than 140 volunteers from the herd. From the herd he culled out 21 of the bravest, stupidest and most secretive. Among them the number one qualification to be on Team Viper racing experience. Because who better to build a fast car than people who actually like to go fast? This ragtag skunkworks team would become the backbone of one of the most important projects in automotive history. But if anyone knew what they were doing, it might just come crumbling down. Lutz stood before his team and gave them three rules. Number one, the budget can't exceed $50 million. Chrysler was broke. Number two, it had to be ready for production by the 1992 Detroit Auto Show in three years. And number three, be ethical, be moral. And most importantly, don't get Lutz in trouble. Other than that, they had free reign. This was and still is unheard of in a massive automobile conglomerate. They didn't have bureaucrats hovering over them. They had no rules. They didn't need to appeal to a board of directors every step of the way. And every man and woman wanted to be there, each of them doing their part to cure the cancer of boring American cars, now being free from bureaucracy came at a cost, though the Dodge bigwigs didn't believe that America wanted a fast car. They were simply interested in profits and volume sales. So if the word got out of an expensive undertaking to make a limited run sports car, well, let's just say loose lips would have sunk that ship to keep the vultures away. Lutz had to keep the budget for the Viper microscopic. Normally, it's not uncommon to see new car development costs stretch into the billions with a B The Viper team only had 5% of that. They had to be incredibly resourceful to do so. The Viper prototype became a parts bin special nicknamed Felicity. The first mule was actually a Corvette that had to be widened to match the viper's dimensions. It was quickly scrapped as it still wasn't wide enough. Castaing snuck parts from the truck division to save on costs, including wheel hubs and suspension components from the upcoming Dodge Dakota. Winkles dusted off a performance Hemi V-8 from the 1960s just so the new prototype could move under its own power. There was just one final obstacle the big boss, Lee Iacocca, now chief executive of Chrysler, a man who'd become the champion of cheap, boring and responsible car design. But Lee was the man who brought the Mustang into the world. Was that person still in there? Buried underneath the years of caked on bureaucratic bullsheet. Lutz aimed to find out. He went to Iacocca's office to pitch the idea of producing the Viper for real. In order to seal the deal, Lutz took with him a secret weapon in the back rooms of Dodge's headquarters sat the man that Iacocca had not been able to say no to all of those years ago, someone he'd listened to, someone who had defined what it meant to make American cars. Carroll Shelby himself. Of course, any real car enthusiast never actually slows down. And at 66 years old, Shelby still had more than enough fire and passion to show Iacocca that Chrysler had lost its way, that America had lost its way, and that Lutz’s team had just the right way to fix it Lutz was, of course, initially against the car being put into production. But his doubts faded with time. And thanks to the inspiring words of Shelby and a glimpse of the prototype, Lutz agreed to show the world what they'd been working on and let the masses decide the future of American cars In 1989 at the International Auto Show, Lutz personally revealed the prototype to a stunned audience. It shocked the press and public immediately and for good reason. First it had bad ass name. The origins of that come from Italy. Tom Gale was having dinner with the head of Italdesign, who at the time was helping design the Eagle premier for Chrysler. Talk of the project came up along with the origins of the Shelby Cobra. Gale asks Giorgetto What an Italian word for snake is Vipera, he replies. Viper. back home, Gill tells Lutz and the team about the chat and Viper becomes the fitting name for the deadly curvy car that will kill you with its bite. And while its name was fantastic, the Viper of 1989 was nothing but a sheet metal mock up with truck parts and an old V8. Its questionable underpinnings mattered not it was an immediate smash hit. The audience of the auto show was used to America as it existed in the eighties. Boring boxes on wheels that could barely move. Yet here, sat this thing. This thing that looked better than a Corvette had a way cooler name and was touted as the fastest car America had ever made. The press were snapped out of the malaise trance shocked into remembering the heritage of American speed. The excitement was undeniable. Enthusiasts sent blank checks to dodge, begging to be put first in line for one. The checks were returned, but Iacocca could no longer deny what Lutz had presented them. They had bottled lightning. And now, with the world eagerly waiting for what was to come with Chrysler's full complement of resources at their disposal, the team was increased to 85 heads. Who got to work on creating the actual car The first step, though, was getting rid of that god awful V8 among the press and slack jawed public at the Viper reveal, said Herb Helbig, an engineer for Chrysler's big horsepower division. Herb had signed up to work in the trenches on Team Viper and Herb's first action was to help ditch the aging V8. Today, tales of Why the Viper Got a V10 range from laziness, tax loopholes and endless bat poop conspiracy theories. The most common one being that the engine is from a Lamborghini. It's not. There's no shared design or parts from a Viper to a Lamborghini. The truth is, the Viper got ten cylinders because Americans are cheap. That makes it no less absurd, though. While Italians were parading around in monstrous V12, and Japan was perfecting the small displacement turbo engine. dodge decided to go their own way and power their supercar with a truck motor. Call it lazy or resourceful. One thing that made it special was that it was different. No one else was putting a ten cylinder engine in a production car. Yeah, you can find them in some racing applications, but overall a V10 is unbalanced, heavy and gigantic. Pretty terrible basis for a road car. So why do it? If you recall, Team Viper had no budget. Hell, half the parts in the car were already from a truck. They figured what the hell was plop the engine in there too. At the time, Dodge's truck division was already prepping a V 10 for the new RAM, a big modern engine with tons of displacement and lots of torque. Most importantly, it was convenient, something they could essentially just drop in the viper's massive engine bay and not have to develop too much. I believe they call this American ingenuity or laziness. You decide. Early on Roush performance had helped mock up the first V 10 prototype engines. But for production, the Viper team turned to Lamborghini, who at the time was a subsidiary of Chrysler. They took the massive chunk of iron and corndogs, recast in aluminum and refined its parts and sent it back stateside. There then was the heart of the Beast, a somewhat lightweight, relatively simple truck derived pushrod behemoth. Nearly eight liters of Democratic power, 400 proud horses descend this beast galloping more Clydesdale than Mustang. It revved low and grunted loud ten cylinders flopping about unbalanced beneath a long hood. Early vipers are described as sounding more like a UPS delivery truck than a finely tuned Italian supercar. They're also described as being really goddamn fast. Sure, it was unbalanced, unsightly, unrefined and unconventional. But the Viper was alive, powered by insane ideas. The heart of a truck kissed by Lamborghini and crammed into a long, low muscle car. Getrag was approached to develop the transmission to negotiate the power to the rear wheels, but they scoffed at the idea of a hamfisted American thrashing their gears. So BorgWarner stepped up to the plate. The combination created a work of art. Not really something Renoir would paint, but akin to a Jackson Pollock. But art nonetheless a masterpiece that could breathe better and grunt louder than anything else. Built simply its intent, pure its delivery, classic. In short, the very first production, Aluminum V 10 was about as American as it could be. Take a little bit of knowledge from everywhere, turn it into something over the top and then claim it was your idea of the entire time when the first prototype rolled off the line using the new production ready v10 enthusiasts from Washington to Florida fell to their knees because they knew their savior had come Together, Lutz and Iaccoca went for a drive and somewhere over the roar of that angry v 10 Iaccoca gave Lutz the green light to make the damn thing. But make it fast. The next year in 1991, only two years after the first clay model, Chrysler was asked to provide a pace car for the Indy 500. Their first choice was the new Dodge Stealth, which was just a rebadged Mitsubishi GTO that pissed Lutz off. Why show off something we didn't even make? After a few choice words with the PR team, the stealth was swapped for the now production ready Dodge Viper. The world got its first glimpse of the new all-American sports car when it opened the famous Indy car race driven by none other than Carroll Shelby himself. The Viper team had done it a production car in three years with minimal budget that not only evoked the raw, untamed spirit of the COBRA, but received the blessing of the Cobra's father. The following January, Dodge tipped the basket and let loose the venomous snakes into the Onlooking crowd. True to its inspiration, the first production Vipers were raw. The top was made from a cheap canvas. There were no door handles. And the only safety feature you got was a seatbelt. Options? None. If you wanted to buy a viper, you were getting an engine with four wheels attached. Comfortable was dead. Cheap metal boxes that put you to sleep were the old Dodge. New Dodge was here to eat raw liver, drink Everclear and kick the Corvettes ass. True to Lutz's vision, the Viper was a cobra for a new generation, and it broke the mold. It became the hero that America needed. It redefined what the American car could be. People lined up to buy them, probably because it was just so different. Today we know Dodge as the cowboy hat brand of muscle cars for ex-Marines. But in the early nineties, they were the company that sold you your first minivan. But their new offering burned that minivan to the ground, and it did it for less money than a Corvette ZR1, an all while looking better, going faster and trying to kill you. No one really cared about that last part. Journalists warned people not to buy them after failing to contain the power on a racetrack. This was the car that might just be your very last. There were rumors that 30% of them crashed on the way home from the dealership. Insurance companies cowered in fear. The cost of a Dodge Viper accident was seven times the national average. To add fuel the fire The first Viper had soft motor mounts that would shake your shifter around. Inattentive drivers would shift from third to second instead of fourth. 465 foot lbs of torque dumped in your lap and you were suddenly getting fitted for a casket. It was even dangerous sitting still. Francois Casting was out with a journalist for an article. They tear up the testing ground and come to a stop. Upon stepping out, Francois’s pants touched the now fire hot side exit exhaust and his pants catch on fire. It was like the car was designed to send you to an early grave. It mattered not. all of these stories and rumors just encouraged the leadership of Dodge. They had absolutely no issue perpetuating the myths. It didn't matter if they were true or not. They worked. The American public heard about this dangerous, untamable, wild beast of a car and it excited that rebellious part of their brain, the part that tells them to measure things in yards and put cheese in a pizza crust. It made them proud again. Sure, financially, the car saved Chrysler, but spiritually. The Viper helped Chrysler save America. Today, the snarling growl of the Viper is in our rearview mirrors, a memory of when the American spirit, once again rose to take on the world in its own way. Thanks to the efforts of Lutz and his team, corporate America learned a valuable lesson. Sometimes you’ve got to hand the keys to the criminals. But sadly, the Viper struggled with its own existence for years. Lee Iacocca retired and handed Chrysler off to some other guy. Lutz left the Chrysler Group rather than watch his creation turn to dust. Gale would go on to design other cars like the Prowler, but would never again build anything as important as the Viper. Winkles left to go racing, Helbig and Stolberg were relegated to the back room, and even though the Viper continued for a few more generations, it was just never the same. It became safer more refined and more expensive. Everything that the original Viper was not. And yet that's okay because the original Viper is still ours. It exists in our hearts and minds as something quintessentially us American, through and through. It didn't belong on European cobblestone roads or fit in tight Japanese cities. The Viper was meant to be screaming down a straight Southwestern blacktop, spitting its vitriol out its side as it outruns some overweight police person sunglasses on, guitars wailing from its radio and the dream of the lawless American firmly in its head. The rebel of the West. A wild horse that conquered the lands. The Viper was great because it was terrible. Like a tiger or a wolf. It could kill you. And that's why it made the perfect pet. It cast a light on who we are as a people. Americans. As flawed as we are great. Not truly the best at anything, but full of an unmistakable spirit. That spirit that everyone else in the world lusts after. The reason they listen to our music and watch our movies. The Viper had the soul of a fighter pilot. The drive of a dedicated racecar driver. And the spirit of America that created NASCAR and Kentucky whiskey all distilled into fire, spit and tire smoke. It was liberty. It was rock and roll. And it was freedom. It was, American.
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Channel: THE SQUIDD
Views: 1,245,763
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: dodge, dodge viper, dodge viper history, carroll shelby, shelby, shelby cobra, csx 2000, shelby cobra history, lee iaccoca, bob lutz, dodge history, k cars, malaise era, dodge cars, supercar, dodge viper gts, dangerous cars, dodge viper acr, cheap supercar, dangerous supercars, rare supercars, cheap supercars you can afford, dodge viper acr sound, dodge demon, dodge challenger, dodge charger
Id: eI_FqHi5ilw
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 33min 3sec (1983 seconds)
Published: Tue Nov 29 2022
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