Viper: The Snake Strikes Twice

of all the sports cars that have ever journeyed from concept to consummation perhaps the most idolized and mythologized is the Shelby Cobra dreamed up by the charismatic Carroll Shelby who stylish Lee finished platforms from AC and England and engines from the Ford Motor Company the Cobra was brutishly powerful devilishly unpredictable and after its second attempt the world GT champion in 1965 the Cobra legacy has been endlessly retold and unfailingly preserved as a piece of nonfiction that could have just as easily been the creation of an always stimulated imagination yet the record is clear between 1963 and 1967 the height of what we now call the muscle car era nothing from Detroit accelerated faster won more races or flaunted its unmatched athleticism like the Cobra not even the Corvette a car which had always been a compromise between raw performance and more genteel passenger accommodations could generate the same kind of gut slamming emotionalism that driving a Cobra poured out in heavy doses when the Cobra was unceremoniously chopped from Ford's lineup at the end of the 1967 model year suddenly a void was created that no manufacturer was either willing or able to fill the 1970s was a period of street-level survivalism for America's auto builders imports were flooding the marketplace and with oil embargos safety legislation hotly debated and pushed through in Washington and the domestic economy rubbery in the knees in expensive cars with good mileage and reassuring crash worthiness with a hot seller by the early 1980s Chrysler was drowning in red ink unable to cash in on the buying trends touched off by the Japanese but thanks to the adventurous corporate footwork of Lee Iacocca a hefty bailout by Uncle Sam and the clever versatility of the Penta stars kei cars and derivative minivans the late 1980s saw a new spirit of inventive optimism echo through the Chrysler Corporation even their acquisition of the Jeep and Eagle division of AMC promised better times ahead this is Chrysler's new markovin assembly plant in Detroit Michigan since 1992 it's been the starting point for production of dodges remarkable Viper r/t 10 roadster and more recently the Viper GTS who unlike the more common assembly lines scattered throughout the Motor City Viper production is much less automated and relies on a high percentage of hand assembly to build this enormous ly powerful automobile and like its manner of assembly the Vipers bold story of how it was first conceived and eventually brought to reality is also vastly different from the trails that are usually followed by new cars born in Detroit the Viper jumped into the jarring vacuum that streamed through the automotive industry with the departure of Shelby scoper and brought with it several new dimensions in not only performance but in how automobiles are built and how one car could almost single-handedly reverse the soft in the middle image of number three car maker this is the Viper the snake strikes twice within the automotive industry there are several showcase events in which the media consumers and executives from competing marks all collectively hobnob and mingle as the world's automobile manufacturers unveil new concepts and ideas International auto shows most notably the North American Auto Show held each January in Detroit itself are glittering and glamorous expose of extreme marketing designed the shellshock all in attendance with light color and sound the corporate decision makers may not willingly admit it but whether or not something fresh from the drawing board gets serious consideration for production is many times tied to the overall responsive receives here in the unsheltered glare of public opinion at the 1989 Detroit Show Chrysler pulled the carpet out from under every other manufacturer in the building with the public debut of a low muscular menacing roadster powered by a 488 cubic inch v8 n aluminum alloy engine producing 400 horsepower with huge wheels and tires tucked under bulging hyperbolic fenders all representing a total cross vector to the direction that Detroit's think tanks had been marshaling themselves for two-and-a-half decades and its name was as subtle as cluster lightning the Viper long before the viper celebrated its coming-out party there had been a passel of informal conversations bouncing from stylist to engineer to powertrain specialists throughout Chrysler's corridors as early as 1987 at the time Chrysler's corporate image was staked heavily on the series of downmarket sedans and station wagons utilizing a durable 2.2 liter four-cylinder engine front-wheel drive and an occasional turbocharger the kei cars had sold well so well in fact that they shoveled enough cash flow into Chrysler to move forward on their next stroke of automotive genius the minivan but other than a few dressed up front drivers with some moderately increased power some by way of Carroll Shelby who is now a Chrysler consultant Chrysler was hopelessly unsexy as performance was once again beginning to set the tempo in Detroit Tom Gail Chrysler vice president of product planning was part of the company's design team in 1988 and recalls a significant conversation he had with Chrysler president Bob lights there are lots of discussions over a period of maybe even a year or two and I can remember Bob Lutz and myself and Carol Shelby and a number of others always having this interest or this passion and recreating something that had the feel of of the 60s Cobra and the date that I remember in the date that sticks in my mind more than anything else is in February of 1988 Bob Lutz they were walking back from a meeting that was down in the boardroom complex down at Highland Park area then before we'd ever moved to this tech center and bob says well I just stopped and he says I want to talk with you chat with you but about a you know basically a Cobra inspired project and and so we we stopped in the officers about a five minute meeting and and that was really when it was kicked off that was in February of 1988 and and so we went to work we went back I never said another word to Bob I came back you know it's about three weeks later and we had a package and sketches and because we had already been kicking around some ideas and we had done some work and and even that initial package had the v10 layout it had pretty much the package configuration of the initial concept car Detroit has never been known to break into a full gallop when formalizing a new car concept too many layers of management and almost fanatical reliance on market surveys and product feasibility studies create a labyrinth of corporate speed bumps but after Gail's discussions with Lutz the design team at Chrysler quickly geared up and sketched out what they interpreted was the general direction in which this new age sports car with an emphasis on Shelby's legendary classic would be headed we invited him back in three weeks and he was just blown away and and just wasn't enthusiastic as Bob always was and of course that was great for us because we just we'd been kind of wanting to do this for a long time and this had been something they'd been backburner and so I just decided we were going to move it out of out of the closet and and so we never said another word then after that session and three weeks later I invited him out to an off-site location that we had and we had a complete clay model already started of the vehicle and and that was what really got us on the on the road and rolling and of course January of 89 we debuted the first concept car at the Detroit Auto Show and that was really what got the ball rolling for Viper everyone was in agreement that the Viper if it was to be built at all would have to offer the wildest ride that money could buy mr. Lotz Gayle Carol Shelby and possibly other people just got in a room and decided that they were looking for an image car for Dodge and they had to have the fastest best accelerating best stopping car possibly in the world but definitely built an America and that's where the whole thing started in any sports cars what lies under the hood has as much to do with its appeal as any other factors Ferraris had long capitalized on their multicam multi-car berated v12 engines from a title claim to their enduring invincibility Shelby's first instinct was to push for a big cube American v8 to power the Viper but Lutz Gail and Castaing favored a new v10 engine being readied for production in the Dodge Ram pickups eight liters for four hundred and eighty eight cubic inches infinite reserves of torque and potentially producible with an aluminum alloy block Shelby didn't need much more convincing to him bigger had always been better well you know when I first learned of the project I was actually working for Carroll Shelby out on the west coast it Shelby automobiles I was doing the technical work for Carroll out there and one day said come on John let's go down to the Pacifica which is Chrysler's a studio out on the west coast and they got a new car they want us to look at and it went down there and I saw the first clay of the Viper it was it was absolutely amazing really at the time it was a little bit bigger than what its ended up being and it was a little bit more rounded and curved but it was just an awesome and unique vehicle and when I first thought I said god this you know this company back in those days I wasn't sure whether we'd really do it and so it was it was unbelievable when when mr. Lutz and he was really the key force behind the car said hey we're we are really going to take a shot at this thing construction of a Viper prototype with the express purpose of appearing at the upcoming seasons international auto shows and close to coast got underway in May of 1988 long before full production had even been considered the Viper was pulling together the entire scope of resources at Chrysler a phenomenon that was about to influence almost every facet of the way the company was to do business a styling team when we started the concept car was very freely done Neel wallings group we had a young man who we assigned out in the off-site shop when we started the claim model we've gotten him started on some of the sketching we had a small group of technical people behind them doing some of the behind him doing some of the packaging and behind Neal doing some of that work and and it was it was very exciting I mean it was nice to come in and and see it and really just encourage it not try to bend it or change it or anything else just let it go from a creative perspective to see what we could get and of course the inspiration was that Cobra how could you get it to have that essence yet be very contemporary and people have looked at and I said well gee you know that's retro and retro and a word in a way as a word I don't really care for it because to me it has almost a negative connotation it shouldn't but it does to me and and what we were always trying to do is have it so that the average person would recognize what we are trying to do yet when you got it out and you set it next to a Cobra or whatever I mean the two things are entirely different very different as the 1989 North American Auto Show opened in Detroit the future of the Viper was about to rest squarely in the hands of the press and the public at large Chrysler was about to test the world's readiness to accept the car so daringly brash from a company which for a long time it seemed to be permanently removed from the performance universe January 1989 Showtime for the Viper those at Chrysler who had logged countless hours nurturing and wet-nurse seeing this insolent Gatecrasher would now nervously await the verdict they needn't have worried the response was Swift and beyond all expectations well there was always risks and there's always pros and cons there were many people who were as passionate about not doing it as they were doing it of course you can imagine that with it with any decision in a major company like this but but I have to say in the case of Viper it was very unique because Viper once we had gotten past the initial response which was overwhelming when the concept car first hit I don't think anybody was really prepared for the response I mean we we thought it was going to be great and yeah and you always go into these projects hoping that's going to be the case but but this one was was really special the passion the excitement the enthusiasm that came back from the general populace was just enormous I mean we had so many letters we had people that would send money and checks and we would return them of course but but but there was always that that enthusiasm for the project that you just couldn't deny and so we finally said you know now it's time to get serious we're gonna get together a team and talk about the production of it I mean it was one thing to do the concept car and that was an effort in itself but it really didn't start getting the the real heavy pros and cons until after we had the concept car and we really decided now okay how are we gonna figure out a way to do with low volume dish production this was something we hadn't done for years really no one in this country has done anything like that to any great extent anyway Chrysler knew a hit when it saw one almost immediately plans were set into place for the production of the Viper the blueprints for the Vipers future were steadily molded into shape with the ultimate goal being a limited run of 200 plus cars offered as 1992 models there was much to do to convert a show-stopping prototype into a real world production exotic soon the team concept was born at cry now one of the things that that Viper wanted to do and in specialty vehicles we've been trying to do this and every program Prowler has followed along in the in the footsteps of Viper is to try some organizational experiments and the big organizational experiment we tried with the Viper was a team approach to doing things where we had all of the extended members of the team which would be finance marketing public relations who all lived right with us in the same same basic area and we were all one big I don't want to say happy family all the time but it allowed us to do a lot of things that with organizational chimneys sometimes you can't do in fact the team approach that vapor use really led to the founding of the platform groups that we now have throughout the corporation as well as the the idea of people empowerment where we're starting to push responsibility down to the lowest levels in the company and it's amazing you do that and people really do step up and assume the responsibility and get the job done in many respects Viper became the symbol for what we were trying to do with the culture inside our company and I would submit to you that symbol of what we were trying to do with the company was probably as important and maybe even more important than the product itself I've often said that and most people don't realize that we had done this more to learn about what we were going to do with teamwork what we're gonna do with platform teams more to have this be just a very small prototype of what we were looking to do in a much larger sense within the company so Viper was very very significant in the in the way we operate as a company when we first decided to do the Viper we had kind of what we thought a secret meeting with Bob Lutz and we invited about 50 people to the meeting kind of all of the enthusiastic car nuts that we had within the company and we got to the meeting and actually 350 people showed up because the grapevine got going and the underground got going and so we had a lot more people show up for for the interviews if you will that we needed diehard automobile enthusiasts were unanimously delirious when national publications shouted the news that the Viper was on its way production but skeptics were quick to point out that a car like the Viper would certainly undergo noticeable changes in style drivetrain and concept as it made its way from turntable star to showroom reality it was up to Chrysler to preserve the look and flavor of the car that owed its very existence to the adoring public that responds you know with people writing your letters and I mean very passionate letters any people that sit down and take the time to write you know generally have something on their mind either positive or negative and and in this case it was just overwhelmingly positive encouraging us to to do this thing and of course when you look back at the image of our company at that time and the products that we produced and then to have something like this it really did help transform the image of the company to some extent as being somewhat more innovative it helped us along the way to becoming somewhat more of a design leader perhaps I think it helped us along the way to establishing some credibility with a group of people that are that are very passionate about their automobiles maybe even consider some of our products in other areas and I have to tell you when you go back and you look at those people that wrote in early and then you look at all the followers during the program I think it probably has helped us in many respects with some of our other products the interesting thing is it is that the essence of that concept car is still there as a matter of fact it didn't really get watered down through the production phase and through all the feasibility and all the things we had to do I would argue that it actually got better it actually was stronger to the original concept then perhaps what that original concept is today when I go back and look at the original car with the very radical windshield and integrated mirrors and things it doesn't look as good to me today is what and what the car does and of course it's evolved over time now we have a coupe model now we have a lot of other variants of the model and it's just continually gotten better and I think that's testimony to a good team of designers but also a good team of of the platform folks and the engineering side who have really had the enthusiasm to to bring it off and preserve that that initial concept true to the image that had been forged by the Cobra 25 years earlier the Viper was as minimal as the device as Detroit had ever seen no side windows no exterior door handles no glitzy instrument cluster or even air conditioning as someone on Team Viper was reported to have said all steak all sizzle no starchy filler if you want to go back to the original prototypes they didn't even have roots and then there was a lot of a lot of internal bickering that at least should have a roof of some kind so when the cars came to production they did have roots they did have pop inside curtains a definite disadvantage to the person that wants to use the car day in and day out there a little bit of trouble as far as to install them and pop them in but I'll tell you the car itself and the excitement of the car far overcomes the side curtains in the roof later in production they came out with a hardtop for that car there are aftermarket companies that have full plexiglass pop in windows but that are a lot nicer to use with that car but 1997 they came out with para windows something maybe they should have done back in 1992 but did not only the consumer knows at this point any new car regardless of its maker model travels a complicated path as it moves from prototype to prod there must be adjustments modifications and long hours of tests miles devoted to eliminating any design flaws engineering rough edges long before the vehicle is ready for market a tough enough task when the car in question has unlimited corporate resources as was the case with Ford's new generation Torrance but the Viper would have to make its way to the buying public in a much less extravagant way I think the biggest challenge in the Viper as far as the underpinnings went was to with the investment we had mix a bunch of components that we take off other production vehicles yet get the kind of sports car that we were looking for so we kind of had to look through the corporate parts bin if you will take the parts that we felt we could use on a viper and then we had to make up the rest of them and I think for the guys that was a big challenge because they weren't allowed to start in some cases with a clean sheet of paper we had a certain investment goals that we had to meet from senior management which were significantly less than a typical program so the guys had to be pretty ingenious in terms of picking and selecting parts that that were in the parts bin and then doing new parts and and I think if you've driven the car they've done a fairly good job there we've got obviously rave reviews on the handling and in the right of the car well there were countless obstacles and almost all of them were major because you had to find first of all a new process to do this we didn't have a process for building a very low volume production vehicle not to mention we didn't have we didn't have the tensile and engine we wanted we didn't have you know almost any component that you could name and so that meant we had to scour and scrounge and become very very creative there were obstacles down to how can you afford to tool things like a sight marker lamp or or another element of the vehicle so we would go off and and read our parts bin or someone else's parts bin it didn't matter we would we would go in and try to find anything and that was sort of the rules of the game anything was fair and I think that also and gendered this this creative spirit that's always been there with the viper team and it continues today right down to the people that are that are crashed persons that are putting that vehicle together when you get out of that plant you talk to the people that spirit is just pervasive and I think it's incumbent upon management to make sure that we support that and keep that alive because that's what keeps projects like this to the point where they're gonna be viable and successful in April of 1990 Viper prototype VMO 2 was completed a test mule was to come the closest to revealing what the first regular production Viper would deliver the performance and appearance it was the first prototype to bear the Chrysler v10 engine although this one was cast iron but the tubular steel chassis fiberglass body and fully independent suspension were accurate indications of how showroom Vipers would be constructed when we finished the first prototype car and Royce shoberg who was leading the program at the time called up mr. Lutz and said gee you know we just got the first car done and we'd like to have you kind of come over and and look at it and of course the guys had just got done building this car we hadn't really tried the car out and mr. Lutz came over and he wrung it out at about ten tenths and we're all kind of sitting there cringing opening the car doesn't braking he doesn't kill himself out there so we had a pretty good pretty good laugh later on about that whole episode I can remember in his endian in Sedona where we were introducing another product and then we were having dinner at night and and out under the stars so to speak and we went off and got the Viper and roared down the street with a Viper and just you know just to see what the reaction was going to be and of course it just pulls everybody away to be able to see one of the very early prototypes was just extremely crude but but that confirming the rumor that that this was going on in the company in which was just wonderful the Viper captured the raw irreverent personality of its forbearer the Cobra but it had also done something inside of Chrysler something much more valuable to the corporate infrastructure Carol shall be doing the Cobra back in the 60s and what we did with the Viper here in the 80s and 90s really was was something that was very similar to what Carol tried to create back in the 60s and that was a team of individuals that were a little bit on the edge if you will in terms of what they tried to do with the with the Cobra and we've done kind of the same thing with with the Viper so I think there's a lot of parallels there if you look at the team approach if you look at the Motorsports activity a lot of the fame from the Cobra came from the racing in the early days Seca racing out on the west coast and then in Europe later on with LeMond those kind of things and if you look at what we've been doing with a viper similar type of approach obviously with just one Lamar this year which we're very proud of last year the FIA GT 2 championship in Europe but beyond that we're now starting to do SCCA racing here in this country so if you go to you know a weekend event one of the local tracks you'll start to see some Vipers there in the t1 class so a lot of a lot of parallelism between between what Carol did back in the 60s and in what we've done when dodge vipers began showing up a dealers for the 1992 model year the avalanche of pre-production publicity ensured that their arrival would not go unnoticed Carol Shelby himself had helped drive up the curiosity for dodges newest sensation by pacing the 1991 Indianapolis 500 in a Viper Viper's were the best insurance a dodge dealer could Bank on to get people into a store automotive magazines clawed at the opportunity to road test this new supercar and the Viper became the most ubiquitous cover car in the modern era and all of this unchecked hysteria was well deserved when the Vipers test numbers began hitting the streets the Viper could cash any check its knockout appearance could run its a zero to sixty car and four and a half seconds and with a few things we can trim it down a four seconds you know it's roughly in 18 seconds zero to 100 and back to zero car and it virtually there's nothing on the street that will match those numbers the 1992 Viper r/t 10 was easily the most talked about new car of the year even the Corvette zr1 which came to market in 1990 with the nickname king of the hill failed to ignite the kind of rampant excitement enjoyed by the Viper I think the proof and the real gratification came when we were at the end of the program this was in like November of 91 when we were doing the long league press stuff and we were standing on the street in Beverly Hills where we did the launch of this thing in a nice hotel and and we had brought all of the journalists out of the meeting room down on the street and the viper team was taking the group around the car down and I was just standing in the background we had already done my little pitch and and down the street was walking this gentleman who was just a bystander just coming down the street and walks down the street and he says wow looks like a cobra and I said to myself you know that's it we captured you know what we wanted to do it and and I think we all had that feeling all along yet you know there was nothing there that that would give you that exact cue because any graphic element any any element of the vehicle per se is is quite different and while the zr1 was unquestionably a world-class sports car and the mightiest production Corvette ever built it was a car that shared little with the viper recipe when you look at the two cars they are really a lot different they seem to fit in the same segment but they're designed under two completely different philosophies I think they're both great cars but the viper really truly gives you that how can I put adrenaline rush I think when you get in the vehicle that you just can't get in any other vehicle it truly gives you that heart pounding feeling that that gives you some of the sense of what you what we used to do I think in the automotive industry in the United States back in the late mid to early 70s with with the sheer rush of the torque and the power of the drivetrain yet it does have the finessin and handling and durability of everything that technology can give you today and obviously credit to that the win of them all this year so I think it's a completely different car for different reasons done under a whole different design concept philosophy so it's really hard to compare the two obviously I'm a little biased towards our car because we think it's a world class vehicle and we've proven that on the racetrack two aspects of the 1992 Vipers successful arrival into the Chrysler new product lineup were reflections of how differently Chrysler was now approaching one the challenges of building prototype based automobiles in the shortest possible time to doing so to the satisfaction of the federal government consumers and the corporate budgeteers well at the time we had a cycle time of about four or five years for any major product program and one of the things we wanted to do was change this culture and change this whole idea about how quickly we could respond to the market and and that's why this one was such a great test culturally for what we were doing in the company and and we've often said that this this new platform team approach was a way for us to dramatically shrink the the time from concept to market and of course we debuted the car in January of 89 and at the beginning of 92 we we had a vehicle in the marketplace and that was one of the things we tried to do is have that that relatively short time period for gestation and this was one of those tools that helped us learn and it's one of those reasons why the Viper was so much more important as a symbol inside the company than the tangible product itself I know that sounds silly to a lot of people out there but I think a lot of us were looking at it with that in the back of our minds because anytime you break the paradigms this helps you learn how to do things with your processes for the for the next program and for more mainstream programs and that certainly helped our company change the way we innovate in the form of product you can never make everyone happy on every day but but I think when we we just kept rolling over the obstacles we were just determined that we were going to make it work and I think it takes that single mindedness to to make something as unique as it was for its time and we had to establish a new process for nish vehicle production we had to come back with a way and offer a way to try to do something you know in a way that that broke every paradigm that we might have in terms of how we manufacture things as a company and even how we go about doing them but I think the one thing that really helped us is as we were mentioning earlier is that the this thing being a symbol for change within the company caused it to have an awful lot of cheerleaders looking down and looking into that project and what about those who felt but the gamble Chrysler was taking was going to slice away at the bottom line by building such an over-the-top sports car in small batches in an assembly plant unique to the car and filling a niche that was a departure from what the company had the greatest amount of experience in with any project like Viper there's always naysayers there's always going to be people who for very good reason by the way would point out that well gosh the returns aren't that good or if we measure this classically perhaps in financial terms or if we measure this even classically in terms of what we're trying to do with very responsible things like corporate average fuel economy or all of those things I mean this doesn't exactly look like a great contributor in some instances but you have to weigh all of that with a certain sense of balance in a certain sense of what you're trying to do with the company and the image of the company and we always submitted that Viper would always get you back more with third-party credibility with what we would get back from the journalists or what we would get back from enthusiasts or what we would get back in the form of just other companies using that as an icon to display their product even if you tried to measure up all of the intangibles that came back from that it would be it would quadruple what we spent on the program so I think you could you could make a financial case but none of it was hard-lined you couldn't go back in line by line account this it was a lot of it was on the soft side but it's very real and I think most of us - a person inside the company from a management perspective got behind it that reason there weren't a lot of naysayers I mean there are a lot of us you know some of us you know on both sides of the fence I mean there's days when you think gee I hope this is the right thing to do it but I think in our hearts we knew it was at the new Mack Avenue assembly plant 1992 Vipers were being built as quickly as orders were being received and yet it was still not fast enough sales were beyond people in 1992 when dodge came out with the car they only built 276 the average Dodge dealer doubled the sticker price cars were exceeding $100,000 plus so initially I don't think the public was really excited about paying double sticker for a car but prices came down to normal list prices as the years evolved and now the car can be bought for a normal sticker price in terms of the numbers we were sold out for a long time we had a limit production of course that brings out some of the worst in in some instances where you know you see the price of them go up but eventually as we start to gauge in the ability to catch up with production that's come back into line fortunately there was a pent-up demand for it when it initially came out the few that they that they did build they sold immediately so nobody knew where this car was gonna go as far as production or as far as image it just there was so few of cars in 92 that you didn't even see him on the road so it was kind of hard in the initial year of 1992 for Dodge to decide how successful this car would be they knew that they were selling as many as they could build so it probably took 93 and then maybe into 94 where they built over 2,000 cars to really know that type of niche that they had established in the market every one of these these owners and every one of this extended family is is confronted when you park the vehicle it's almost impossible to go anyplace and and be able to do it in a certain timeframe when you roll up with the Viper you're gonna be you're gonna be confronted with people that want to talk about it and you have to you know plan that type into into doing something with a vehicle of course that's a wonderful problem I think it's a wonderful problem for the owners it's it's it's certainly an extroverted type of vehicle and it was always intended to be that brash back-to-basics type of type of thing that elicited that spirit while the viper are t10 roadster was everything advertised there was still a segment of disenchanted enthusiasts who weren't ready for the sacrifices required and owning a car with little protection from the elements unknown to most outside of Chrysler a Viper coupe had been sketched out not long after the Roadster version was proposed with a silhouette and pin scheme borrowing heavily from the Cobra Daytona Coupe the Viper GTS was as big a sensation as the Roadster if not more so when it went into production for the 1996 model year with 450 horsepower and the kind of amenities more in keeping with grand touring cars the GTS at 69 thousand dollars and the r/t 10 roadster at around 57 thousand dollars would both be purchased together for less than what you have to pay for one portrait turbo Carrera for the strong suits of the Viper obviously sit right square between the front wheels and under the hood the v10 engine the power behind in the heart of the Viper if you will with with its horsepower and especially its low-end torque I mean the real exciting part in to some extent the intimidating part of a Viper is the engine in the way that engine puts puts the torque to the rear wheels so I would say that really the the heart and soul is is the engine followed closely I think by the spirit of the car which is its handling characteristics which are indicative of the suspension and the tires gradual refinements to the Viper throughout the ensuing model years focused on driver and passenger comfort and convenience along with additional choices of exterior paint color but the overall style shape and palace of the Viper have retained its most unpleasant statement when you're first kind of see the car and you're standing around getting ready to get into it at first it's kind of intimidating you don't quite know what to expect you're sitting behind the wheel of something that's got a tremendous amount of torque 460 horsepower if you will it's got tires that look like a race car and so I think at first you're a little bit intimidated but once you get behind the wheel of the car and start to get comfortable with a car they kind of blend in to it and you kind of get in the flow with a car if you will and having that much torque under your foot and then the way the car handles just awesome I guess it's the best way to describe it like a Shelby Cobra before it the Viper was destined to not only snap heads around on the boulevards of America but to become a presence on the endurance road courses of the world you could consider that as early as 1989 and as late as 1992 because with the level of engineers designers involved in this project the enthusiasm levels obviously are different depending on which engineer or designer you talk to the reality of it is we started really looking at it from the platform team environment and this was the first vehicle that really brought the platform team concept to Chrysler Corporation once we realized what an asset it was the next element of that asset was to develop the fullest potential of the engineers and designers and that's why in probably late 93 and early 94 the decision was made that it would be a good idea to research the concept of racing the car in the endurance environment and late in 94 we began testing that and in 1995 the vehicle actually did go out and do some testing in the local environment in 1996 we actually did start endurance racing and in Europe the Pipers national and international rate racing record is not too complex actually we haven't done a lot of racing in the US with it because sports car racing and endurance racing in general at this level has not really solidified in the u.s. marketplace and isn't as strong as it is globally so our international record we feel is very well very good we have won last year the the FIA GT 2 championship for both the manufacturer and the drivers championship and we're the first US manufacturer ever to have done that and recently just in in 1998 we are the first US manufacturer in 29 years to won the prestigious 24 Hours of LeMans in gt2 with the Viper and and frankly back to a previous question it's the first US production based vehicle ever to win that race it is almost uncanny that the viper should win the most prestigious sports car race in the world so shortly after its racing debut in much the same way that the Cobra won the world GT Championship in but its second full year of international competition a few years ago and it was just before we started announced that we were going to go to Lamar a magazine and a gentleman writing for that magazine came in to interview myself and a couple senior executives at Chrysler here in Detroit and we were asked the question as I was asked today you know what's important about this program in my response to him was the same answer that our people and our process and our product were critically important and almost more important than winning on Sunday and selling Vipers on Monday and very quickly the gentleman said to me well how could you possibly think about going to Lamar if you don't think you could win my answer back to him very quickly was if we don't win does that mean we lose he said to me I'll probably grow hair before you guys qualify for that race well all of that is history today and I can tell you that that a group of us got together with one of our senior executives and went to a local pharmacy and purchased a product that you used to grow hair and send it to him and and congratulating him on his comments and and wished him luck in his future interview endeavors but what kind of future awaits the Viper could the fickle dynamics of the marketplace endanger this benchmark sports car that has perhaps only slightly tapped into its vast potential I really feel that dodge would never drop this car for because of the niche that it's created in the market with the Viper club's there are Viper clubs throughout the country they have events on a monthly basis normally Dodge has a National Convention where hundreds and hundreds of vipers and Viper owners show up it's just it's just a niche that I feel that won't go away for a lot of reasons mainly because Dodge likes this part of the market they like the people if they've attracted to their product and it just seems like something that they will never let go everyone has a different view of how it happened I mean if you asked everyone you know what the genesis of it was I think the important thing is is that when we all came together to make the critical decisions when we all came together to offer the support and find a way and we're had to go often and break down a few walls to to get something done it was that symbol for change with inside within the company and and that's critical almost any time you have an undertaking or a major program

Channel: WheelsTV

Views: 17,898

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: Dodge Viper, Cobra, Carroll Shelby, Viper, Performance Sports Cars, V-10 Engine, GTS Coupe, RT10, V10, Dodge, Mopar, Tom gale, automotive design

Id: _ie7V8yyAbA

Length: 47min 46sec (2866 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2015