► V10-engined American monster driven
► Utterly thrilling on the right road
► But deeply flawed in many ways
Some cars are a real event. Not just for the driver but for passengers, passers-by, people in the next county. The Dodge Viper is one such car, especially when it’s bright yellow.
It’s a car with a fearsome reputation; a lightweight, V10-engined missile that’s as bitey as its ophidian namesake. But is that reputation justified? We drove supercar club Auto Vivendi’s recently acquired example to find out.
At a glance
Pros: It has huge presence, the engine might be an all-time great, surprisingly athletic handling Cons: The gearbox is obstreperous, the interior is comically awful, it’s not one for shrinking violets
What is it?
Chrysler president and diehard petrolhead Bob Lutz had the idea that his company should build a latter-day Cobra. That idea led to the Dodge Viper, first seen as a concept in 1989. Everyone wrote it off as a mere flight of fancy, so the world was astonished when it went on sale in 1991.
Badged RT/10 – and codenamed SR 1 – the first-gen Viper really lived up to the Cobra remit: massive engine up front, drive at the back, tiny two-seater cockpit in the middle. The voluptuous, targa-top body was made of fibreglass panels on a steel tubular frame. It was relatively light at 1500kg-ish and not as big as you think, measuring under 4.5 metres long. Nearly two metres wide, though.
At launch, it was one of the most powerful, fastest cars in the world but had a reputation for hairy handling. Though many of its vices could be ascribed to the seemingly rigid suspension.
The updated SR 2-gen RT/10 arrived in 1996. It was broadly the same car but featured some small yet important revisions. A new design of five-spoke wheel replaced the previous three-spokes, the side-exit exhaust was switched for a centre-rear outlet. It also featured such previously unavailable niceties as a removeable hardtop, glass side windows and exterior door handles. It’s one of these that we’re experiencing here.
What are the specs?
Everyone knows that the Dodge Viper has an immense V10 engine – one of the biggest engines fitted to a production car post-World War Two. In the RT/10, it’s a 7986cc unit producing up to 444bhp and 490lb/ft of torque (depending on year). That power’s channelled through a six-speed BorgWarner gearbox to the back axle.
Performance figures depend on who you ask, but the 0-62mph time of around 4.5 seconds and top speed of well over 170mph undoubtedly made the Viper one of the fastest cars in the world in the 1990s.
Now, something everyone thinks they know about the Viper’s engine is that it’s based on a truck motor. But that’s a myth I believe Jeremy Clarkson is to blame for. He made the link because, by the time the Viper became semi-officially available in the UK, the US-market Dodge Ram pickup truck was also available with an 8.0-litre V10 engine.
The assertion isn’t entirely untrue, as both the Viper and Ram engines are based on Chrysler’s 5.2-litre ‘Magnum’ V8. However, the Viper uses a unique aluminium cylinder block designed by Lamborghini – which Chrysler owned at the time – and predates the Ram by several years. The Ram’s engine is essentially a bored-and-stroked version of the Magnum with two extra cylinders grafted on, the block made from cast iron. So the two are superficially similar but completely different in execution.
What’s it like inside?
It’s not often I sit in a car, look around the interior, prod a few things and burst out laughing. Let’s start with the positives. The steering wheel is in exactly the right place and feels great, the chunky gear level falls easily to hand, leg and shoulder room are surprisingly generous. And everything else is, erm, terrible.
The pedals are so far offset to the left I feel like my feet are outside. I can barely see the dials from my seating position. The view out is severely limited. The mirrors are borderline useless. The dashboard is a sea of elephant grey and made from thin, hard, scratchy plastic that Lada couldn’t have countenanced. Nothing fits properly, everything feels flimsy. It’s comically bad.
But I don’t care. The Viper’s massive charisma seeps out of every crevice and misaligned joint. And the quality of the plastics is the last thing on your mind when you drive it.
What’s it like to drive?
I once interviewed someone who raced the Dodge Viper GTS-R back in the late 1990s. That’s the GT2-spec car based on the SR 2-gen Viper GTS coupe that so dominated GT racing the FIA effectively banned it. He described the GTS-R as feeling like a big Caterham. I was sceptical, but I can now see what he meant.
That’s not the initial impression, though. Stationary, the clutch is immensely heavy and very long, the brakes a button and the gearbox recalcitrant. Everything lightens on the move, though. They still need muscle, but not the He-Man levels I expected.
Narrow, ruined Essex lanes and central London streets are not the Viper’s natural environment. You’re sat on the wrong side of the car, can’t see out very well, it’s nigh-on impossible to judge where the front corners are. The ride quality is utterly appalling. The brakes are there, somewhere. And yet…
There’s an incisiveness to the steering, an immediacy to the whole car’s responses. The steering feeds every nuance of the road surface to you, despite the immense width of the front tyres. Sat right in front of the back axle, to sense exactly how much grip is there, you can feel every twitch and shimmy. That Caterham comparison is definitely apt.
And that engine. What a thing it is. So much torque, quite slow-revving, really long throttle. I simply don’t have the space to stretch it much beyond 3000rpm, at which point it’s really coming on strong, the characteristic V10 howl chimes in. Below three grand it produces a flat blare exactly like that of a 1920s four-cylinder Bentley – not to all tastes but I really like it.
That torque means you don’t have to worry too much about the gears. That’s a good thing. The shift is slow and crunchy; it takes so long to change from fourth to third that I have to adapt my approach to corners to make sure the gear’s in before I have to turn. I discover block changes down are quicker and easier. Try to change from first to second below 1500rpm and it just won’t.
At home in Yorkshire, there are loads of those fast, sweeping A- and B-roads us motoring journalists love so much. There’s one I know particularly well that the Viper would come alive on. It’s the kind of car that gets better the faster you go – it just doesn’t like going slow.
And you really don’t need to take brave pills to take it by the scruff. Yes, it can bite if you push too hard, but I suspect modern tyres and perhaps uprated dampers would move back the point at which it does bite quite a lot.
Verdict: Dodge Viper RT/10
In many ways, the Dodge Viper is a terrible car. The interior is laughable, it’s hard work to drive, it’s not especially comfortable, I dread to think how much fuel it uses. And yet the more I think about it, the more I want to get back in it.
First thing on a sunny morning, take the A59 west from Harrogate across the Dales, or the A170 east from Thirsk to Scarborough. Roads I know extremely well, roads that have the space to let the Viper run. That would be glorious.
Images courtesy of Auto Vivendi