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
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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.
