Watch the 1,035 HP Hennessey Dodge Demon Punish the Drag Strip

Can an extra 195 horsepower make a big impact in the quarter-mile?
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If you didn’t think 840 horsepower in the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon was quite enough, Hennessey has you covered. Hennessey offers what it calls the HPE1000 upgrade for the Demon which cranks the engine up to 1,035 hp and 948 pount-feet of torque resulting in 880 hp and 806 pound-feet at the wheels.

These insane numbers are achieved by upgrades like stainless steel long tube headers with high-flow catalytic converters, upgrades to the supercharger and crankshaft pulleys, and a Hennessey Performance Engineering engine management upgrade with chassis dyno calibration. The upgrades don’t stop with just performance. You also get Hennessey badging inside and out, a before and after dyno graph, and a one year, 12,000-mile limited warranty.

To show off what the upgrades can do, Hennessey took an HPE1000 Demon to its natural habitat: a drag strip. Along with some obligatory burnouts, we see the bright yellow muscle car do a few runs down the quarter mile while the supercharger and the exhaust play in perfect harmony.

The best run Hennessey could put down was a quarter mile time of 9.38 seconds at 146 mph. That’s impressive by any standards, but the numbers for a stock Demon ate a 9.65 second quarter mile at 140 mph.

The Hennessey upgrades are cool, but I think the whole point of the Demon is that it’s all done straight from the factory. There’s almost nothing else you can do to it to make it better at what it was made to do, which is go really fast in a straight line. Hennessey’s quarter mile has proven that by just barely beating the numbers for the stock version of the car in the quarter mile. Are all of those upgrades really worth it to shave a quarter-second off the quarter-mile time?