Hennessey puts the Dodge Demon through its paces
Watch as the mighty Dodge Demon stretches its legs. Showing off with 721bhp at the wheels and 0-60mph in 3.2s
Before undertaking any sort of tuning on your car it’s always good to establish a baseline, ensuring any changes you make result in a measurable improvement.
The same applies at every level of the industry, which is why Hennessey Performance, best known for its Venom supercar (which trades top-speed records with Bugatti) and six-wheeled takes on Ford’s F-150 Raptor, has run a series of tests on America’s performance car of the moment, the Dodge Demon.
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Struggling to place the Demon? Think Dodge Challenger Hellcat, the 707bhp retro-styled muscle car, but granted even more power and a chassis set up for nine-second, 140mph quarter-mile runs with just a few small tweaks from showroom floor specification.
If you’re wondering where Hennessey could go with such a car, then think engine tuning, new headers and supercharger upgrades, taking the power beyond the stock 808bhp and into the 1000-1500bhp realm - with drag-suitable upgrades like parachutes and roll-cages also in the works.
As for that baseline, Hennessey has released videos in which it tests the Demon’s power on the dyno, its quarter-mile performance and its top speed.
The results - you may want to skip ahead a bit in each video to get to the meat of the tests - are predictably impressive: 721bhp and 684lb ft at the wheels, a 10.8-second quarter at 131mph (having passed 60 in 3.2sec and 100mph in 6.6) and an indicated top speed of 164mph.
All were achieved on a fairly new, tight engine, so there’s undoubtedly more to come. A lot more, when Hennessey begins its part-swapping, which should begin very soon. More videos are sure to be on the way.