In an effort to show that the Dodge brand still has plenty of life left in it, the Street and Racing Technology (SRT) team showed up to Laguna Seca with a shiny new 2010 Dodge Viper SRT10 ACR.  While the 2010 Viper SRT10 ACR will officially debut at the 2009 LA Auto Show in a week, Dodge was eager to show that the updated 2010 Viper was much more than just a pretty face.  Chris Winkler drove the Viper to a 1:33.915 lap, besting the previous production car record  of 1:35.075.  

The 2010 Viper SRT10 ACR features a few small but noteable upgrades over the previous year SRT10 ACR models including a revised short-throw shifter, shorter fifth gear ratio, and a retuned rear aero package.  More details will be announced next week when the LA Auto Show kicks off. 

Check out the video of the record breaking lap after the jump!

Continue reading Last Hurrah – 2010 Dodge Viper SRT10 ACR Sets New Lap Record At Laguna Seca

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Story by Jack Baruth, photography by Matt Chow and Zerin Dube

Are you a shy person? Do you suffer from social anxiety? Are you uncomfortable with being the center of attention in public settings? If the answer to any of the above questions is “Yes”, then we respectfully suggest you avoid the 2008 Dodge Viper SRT-10 convertible, particularly in the eye-searing shade of blue applied to our test car. As a Viper owner, you will be permanently on the American road’s center stage, targeted by dropped jaws, pointed fingers, and comments ranging from the predictable “NIIIICE CARRRRR!” to the rather confusing statement delivered to us at a gas station by a fading flower of a middle-aged Texas woman in a Town Car -“We’re so proud of you.” Who was “we”, and of whom, exactly, were “they” proud, and why? Perhaps she’d spotted the manufacturer tag on the car and thought we were affiliated with the intrepid (no pun intended) folks at Chrysler’s SRT division, or she simply wanted to let us know how happy she was that we’d chosen an American sports car over the evil foreign competition, or she thought your humble author was a famous bearded celebrity – one of the Geico cavemen, perhaps, or even Michael McDonald, touring the country in a six-hundred-horsepower droptop while contemplating which Motown originals would be easiest to mangle into blandness for his next album. We’ll never know. Apparently, mere possession of America’s most cylinder-intense sporting car turns one into a public figure, with all the attendant positives and negatives. Learn from our experience and consider yourself warned. Driving a Viper is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the wallflowers among us.

If, however, you are a painfully modest or fearful individual who nonetheless feels compelled to own an SRT-10, there is one potential solution, assuming you have the bucks: buy an Audi R8 and hire somebody to drive it around behind you. In the Audi’s incandescent presence, the big blue Viper becomes well-nigh invisible, just another minnow in the school of freeway fish which clump and cluster in the R8’s wake, camera phones aloft and trembling at The Presence Of The Future Among Us.

Continue reading Supercar Saturday Part Two: Taking it to, um, the streets.

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Story by Jack Baruth, photography by Matt Chow and Zerin Dube

It’s the space of an eyeblink. Three-tenths of a second. At one hundred and forty-six miles per hour, as the bright blue Viper SRT-10 convertible hammers into MSR Houston’s Turn Six, I am covering sixty-four feet in every twitch of the eyelid. In that space of time, as I apply the first touch of braking with my left foot while simultaneously easing off with the right, – in that sixty-four feet – the Viper strikes in a sudden scream of tire, the world slews sideways through the windshield, and I know, beyond doubt, that I have just made a very serious mistake.
Continue reading Supercar Saturday Part One: Running the R8 and Viper against the clock at MSR Houston.