Official Photos & Info: 2008 Dodge Viper ACR – Car News |
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Strictly for the hard-core: an even faster, furious-er Viper. |
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| BY STEVE SILER, | November 2007 | |
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| We Americans are not exactly known for our prudence. We don’t solve problems or manage our dilemmas by cutting back on excess but rather through shocking, awe-inspiring displays of brute force.
Case in point: the Dodge Viper SRT10, a beast with an innate piss-on-the-world brashness we needn’t explicate any further. And so, when we heard that Dodge had readied “the ultimate Viper for road and track,†did we expect Dodge to use exotic materials and strip the big coupe of needless weight, à la Ferrari Scuderia or Porsche 911 GT2, or simply add massive aero appendages and buckets of horsepower? |
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Whoops! Not so fast. This time, the SRT folks pulled a Colin Chapman on us and added not horsepower but lightness in creating the new Viper ACR. It is only 40 fewer pounds than the 3450-pound Viper coupe, but that’s still lighter. And if there’s a car that doesn’t need a horsepower boost, that would be the Viper.
Indeed, the standard Viper’s 600-hp, 8.4-liter V-10 with 560 pound-feet of torque produces as much raw output as most hyper-tuned, track-only racers, and thus SRT left it alone and kept other mods simple but effective. This also helped Dodge keep the car at an as-yet-unannounced target price point of less than $100,000.http://www.caranddriver.com/carnews/14324/official-photos-info-2008-dodge-viper-acr.html?al=122