Dodge Claims It’s Not Screwing Over Demon Owners with the 807-HP Challenger SRT Super Stock
If you want the special Demon parts, you better know the special Demon password.
When the 807-horsepower 2021 Dodge Challenger SRT Super Stock was announced in June, something like 3,300 people suddenly found themselves with a few questions. Those people, of course, are Dodge Demon owners—you know, that wheelie-popping, super-special-edition Challenger that stormed onto the scene in 2017 with 807 horsepower, a sub-10-second quarter mile time and exorbitant six-figure markups. And their biggest question: What the hell did I pay out the nose for if Dodge is now making Demons by another name?
To recap, the Challenger SRT Super Stock has the same 6.2-liter, 807-horsepower supercharged V8 engine as the Demon, though without the tuning to run on race gas and hit the Demon's max 840 horsepower. The Super Stock also has the Demon's launch control, line lock, Nitto NT05R 315/40R18 drag radials, torque reserve and Power Chiller cooling system. On paper, this puts the Super Stock just a few components away from Demon-tier performance.
But as Motor Authority reports, Dodge claims it was careful to leave out the special sauce and preserve the Demon's drag strip dominion. Those few missing components in the Super Stock—the hood, the trans brake, the skinny front wheels, race fuel ECU tuning and various suspension parts that effectively maximize weight transfer to the rear wheels in a launch—are needed for the Demon to achieve its promised 9.65-second quarter-mile time. And Dodge says it won't sell them to anyone without a Demon VIN, including any future Super Stock owners who have the bright idea of building their own Demon clone.
"I was serious about what I said in the reveal I promised we'll never do another Demon," Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis said to Motor Authority. "And I happen to own a Demon so it's actually personal to me. Not only don't I want to piss off the 3,299 other people, I don't want to piss off myself."
Accordingly, the 807-horsepower Dodge Challenger SRT Super Stock nails the quarter mile in 10.5 seconds, while an 807-horsepower Demon on pump gas does it in 9.9 seconds. Six tenths of a second is an eternity in drag racing, to be fair, and all most people know is that the Demon is the rare production car that can do it under 10 seconds.
If the Super Stock can't, it'll never be a Demon, and owners of the latter can sleep soundly knowing they've still got a special machine. Super Stock owners will have plenty of fun, too. I mean, it's an 807-horsepower muscle car, and Kuniskis reiterated that it's also been built for sustained drag strip duty. Just not quite the same as the Demon.
This all ignores the fact that the aftermarket will reverse engineer all those Demon parts eventually anyway, so an army of upgraded Super Stocks might roam the streets one day yet. Personally, I'd rather have factory support.
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