Dodge has thrown down the gauntlet and now claims to have the most powerful muscle car on the market with the introduction of the Hellcat engine that was inserted into the new design of the 2015 Challenger SRT. The same claim to fame can be applied to their 4-door counterpart after announcing the veritable Hellcat engine is now available in the refreshed 2015 Charger SRT. With 707 horsepower and 650 lb.-ft. of torque summoned from a 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI® Hellcat V8, both the Challenger and Charger can decimate almost any production street car off the line. For the Challenger, those impressive numbers translate into a zero-to-60 time of 3.7 seconds* and an NHRA certified quarter-mile time of 10.8 seconds at 126 mph racing on drag radials.
All marketing aside, we wanted to see for ourselves if the new Hellcat HEMI V8 could pump out the big horses under an independent test. Thus we borrowed a Challenger SRT Hellcat from Dodge and brought it to our local tuner that has a Dynojet dynamometer.
The shop that did the test for us was Synergy Auto Works located in San Jose. The day we brought the Hellcat to the shop was a typical NorCal day – about 82 degrees Fahrenheit, sunny and dry with the barometer holding steady at 30.08 inches (in-Hg). There was a mild 8 – 10 mph westerly breeze keeping the afternoon pleasant at 7 – 9 percent humidity.
We had Synergy Auto Works do three runs back-to-back with a few minutes between runs to allow for cooling. Our best pull was the first run at 577hp and 545 lb.-ft. torque measured at the wheels with 80% torque available beginning around 2,500 rpm. Accounting for an 18 percent loss of power due to drivetrain friction, the supercharged Hellcat engine can easily produce 707hp as advertised. What doesn’t appear on the dyno chart is the amount of power that is virtually untapped. Even at the engine’s relatively low 5,800 rpm redline, we could easily tell the Hellcat V8 had a lot more to give – there was no sign of the power band flattening out or any indication that the engine was near its limit.
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As we have seen with other SRT cars, which we have dyno-tested in the past, the numbers published by Dodge are conservative and faithful to the engine’s true performance level. With the SEMA show coming up in November, we are anxious to talk with a few Mopar tuners and find out how much more power they can tune the Hellcat with some fine ECU tuning and still keep the car’s reliability.
See 2015 Dodge Challenger for sale on eBay.
