Devine Blasphemy, a Viper On The Loose
When you’re a child, you’re encouraged to use your imagination and dream big--we can do anything, the sky's the limit--all that jazz. Unqualified aspiration and self esteem building is just fine and dandy, but you tend to grow up upon which you’re told that your ideas are not so good, that you must assimilate to the dogmatic system of sodomy and ladders that leads to corporate success, and that what you really want is a beige Camry, a so-so wife, and a split level near a major metropolitan area with plentiful middle management opportunity. Hopefully then, as their side windows shatter and their ear drums bleed, the savage, cantankerous cacophony of defiance coming out of the Viper’s exhaust will wake the dormant and defeated from their slumber and encourage them to loosen their ties, slap their wives on the bottom, and have a few too many. For the Viper is unapologetic in its mischievous pursuit to provoke, incite, and delight. While the solemn pragmatists may find themselves embarking up that corporate ladder, they’re working under a dreamer’s empire. It is for the dreamers--those that embrace their lack of practical sanity and yearn for more theatre out of life, that the Viper beckons. While many rightfully think of the old Vipers as meth tripping ax murderers with a tinge of lunacy sparkling in their eyes, the new one is more of a functional psychopath in a business suit--not unlike a successful CEO. While the Viper may look aggressive as ever and unmistakably ophiological, it has gone to finishing school and can now tell you which fork is for salad before biting your face off. This is a car you can drive every day without being incinerated, scarred, or wrapped around the nearest elm whilst turning into Target for a pair of briefs, but there’s still enough ever present anarchy to imbue just the right dose of fear and menace onto a peaceful commute . Such is the delightful revelation I had pulling out of Glenbrook Dodge in Fort Wayne Indiana on route to New York in the only car I’ve ever felt to be equal parts Metatron and Mephistopheles.
Last we spoke, I was recovering from the grave injustice of ill timed slumber that saw a middle aged man plow into the Lotus Evora at a stop light, quickly decimating what was a fiberglass bodied masterpiece. A soul searching quest for Lotus like brilliance ensued as the reality of no new Evora’s coming to the states set in. There’s a good chance a new and improved 16’ Evora will be on the way, and let’s pray to our prefered deities that becomes truth. Until then, I was left to find a manual transmission adorned, visceral, driver focused sled, and oddly the brash American has turned out to be much more Lotus like than I would have ever thought.
The Viper is a dream. If it isn't your dream, your dreams aren't good enough. When I was a child wasting away in the prison of intellectual stagnation that was the Long Island public school system, it was images of the Viper that kept me sane and hungry. It has the curves of a Pininfarina supermodel with the mischief and tattoos of a pre-child hoarding Angelina Jolie. Obsessed as I was with all special cars, the Viper always held a revered position atop an untouchable mantle of badassery. You had to be both a serious car enthusiast and five years old to buy a Viper, a combination that made them rarer than Ferrari’s, Lamborghini’s, and the like on brand conscious Long Island. I was captivated at first glance and it didn’t matter that they were badly tempered at the limit and toxic to an amateur. They were perfect, and so help me-- I would have one. It was the first car who’s stats I memorized, the first car I remember being aware of as a sentient being. To say I love the Viper is a brash understatement. If oil is in my veins, so help me, the Viper is my heart.
The Viper’s engine could easily double as a third world country power plant, as the utterly ludicrous 640HP 8.4 Liter V10 defeats any piece of road with 600 lb-ft of torque altering the gravitational pull of the planet when you bury your foot. It’s not fast--no. Fast is flooring it in the latest BMW M whatever with effortless speed that is still somehow conceivable. The Viper doesn't so much accelerate as it berates your body and forces your brain to comply with full sensory overload. The noise at normal engine speeds sounds like MGM’s Lion and an insolent bear getting in a New England bar fight. Flooring it is like concentrating the violence of a severe earthquake inside an airplane bathroom while being attacked by killer bees to an Iron Maiden soundtrack. It’s such an experience that the lunacy of the speed is less surreal than the fact that the outside world is still somehow intact when you’re done accelerating. I’ve been lucky enough to drive some of the most visceral of sports cars money can buy, and nothing, absolutely nothing, commands your attention like the fury of a Viper at full throttle. It’s a wondrous delight that I feel easily justifies the entire question of the human experience. Man was put on earth to design a machine that turns ancient dinosaur guts into pure, unbridled joy.
Nothing I have ever piloted has been so analog, so involving, yet relatively docile when it’s just puttering around town. It’s not to say that it’s ever easy. The ride is relatively firm, the steering heavy (and wonderfully communicative), the noise always present. But it’s the perfect dose of livable craziness at baseline and a syringe of adrenaline to the heart at a moments notice. I drove the Viper almost 1000 miles in two days and my back never hurt, ass never ached, and I never tired of the experience.
The car surprises you with the ways in which it’s delicate. You’d think it’s gear lever would require a daily steroid regimen familiar to the Viper owner stereotype, but so help me, it’s the best gearbox I’ve ever used this side of a Honda S2000. The shifts are at wrist flick effort, precise, and delightfully tactile. The brake feel is sublime and easy to modulate, and the throttle has a pleasantly long travel, whereas 10% of throttle travel actually equals 10% of engine work, unlike most modern cars. The interior is right out of a Ferrari and in fact uses the same seats. Everything smells expensive and looks impeccably screwed together. Chrysler’s Uconnect system puts almost every single infotainment center I’ve ever used to shame; its on the same level as Audi’s brilliant MMI, only far more intuitive to use. It’s really a pointless endeavor to describe the handling in the written word-- It’s mesmerizingly brilliant. Turn the wheel and it changes direction with the confident authority of a southern cop, only with much more transmitted information. Most notably for a Viper, it tells you what's going on well before it tries to rip your head off.
The story of the Viper is one of passion and defiance, developed as it was by a group of nutcases after work hours in a glorified shed. With the help of Lamborghini and Carroll Shelby, the original Viper graced this fine world in 1991 with plastic windows, no outside door handles, and a for the time utterly stratospheric 400 HP. The current Viper’s V10, a derivative that dates back to the original, is not the simple brute people think it to be. Its block is made of forged internals, and the finest of titanium rods. While a Ferrari has to run home to the dealer to have it’s fluids changed every time it scabs a toe, the Viper’s engine is so overbuilt you can easily supercharge it to over 1,000HP with no major modifications and all it’ll need is new spark plugs every 96,000 miles. It may only have two valves per cylinder, but when you’ve got an engine making this kind of power, just who in the hell cares.
In 2008, so much fecal matter had impacted so many fans that everyone and their aunt Susan were declaring bankruptcy, Chrysler included. There was a devastating time with they tried to sell off the Viper brand for a pittance, but thankfully no one bit. Then a miracle happened. Fiat bought Chrysler, and suddenly you have the auto industry's closest equivalent to Steve Jobs running the show. Sergio Marchionne did something amazing and gave Ralph Gilles control of the SRT brand, and the thing about Ralph is that he’s eight years old. So what Ralph did is look the other way and leave some cash around while a team of rambunctious engineers pilfered the bones of what was an early Mercedes SLS chassis left around from the old Mercedes-Chrysler marriage and turn it into the new Viper. When Marchione found out, he was irate until he saw the design, fell under the Viper’s spell, and green lit the god damn thing, just a year after the entire company was on the brink of disaster. It’s important to understand how little sense this makes, and how many full grown well educated adults had to decide to say screw it and naughtily force the Viper into existence against a raft of common sense and healthy accounting. I love it.
If the Viper were a Harvard Business School study they would have considered it with the same sense of feasibility as a petting zoo on mars. Ultimately, it has this magical ability to make very smart people do stupid things. The world needs more Vipers. It’s stupendously, utterly, mesmerizing, gobsmackingly good fun, and in this time of left-brained overly-procedural red light camera laden dangerously litigious hypo allergenic kale salad flavored gutlessness, the Viper is the wet towel to the family jewels we all need to remind us that life is worth living. What a car.