Jeremiah 29:11

Dodge Challenger Concept Car - '08 Hemi Super Stock

Mopar Performance Builds An '08 Super Stock Hemi Challenger And Then Lets Hot Rod Beat On It.
By Bill McGuire

This is special. When this project was conceived, there was only one running '08 Dodge Challenger prototype in the whole world. And as you can guess, it has been pretty busy doing the car-show scene and hauling journalists around. Mopar Performance Parts wanted a Challenger, too. A smash hit when it was introduced on the floor of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit last winter, the Challenger was the perfect vehicle to showcase Mopar's new 392 Hemi crate engines and to fly the flag for Chrysler performance at the SEMA show in Las Vegas. The Mopar people just couldn't wait until 2008 like the rest of us will have to, so they built another new Challenger, from scratch, and Hot Rod was there to look in on the construction.

Chrysler's SkunkWerks team, a loose-knit group made up of employees from various departments and led by Vice President of Design Ralph Gilles, began by working up special paint and style treatments for the project. "There is so much creativity in this team," Gilles said. "A lot of these guys are hot rodders by nature. They bring, in some cases, 30 years of hot-rod experience to the project." One early rendering, a Pro Streeter done up in bright silver and flat black, soon evolved into an all-out tribute to Chrysler's early Super Stock and Pro Stock racers. Slicks, wheelie bars, and a big fat hoodscoop testified that the Challenger meant business, while red, white, and blue panel graphics evoked the famous Dick Landy, Ramchargers, and Color Me Gone Mopar Hemis of the '60s. The Dodge Challenger Super Stock Concept had taken form, and it was a form every hot rodder could recognize. Suddenly, it's 1970 going on 2008.

Using digital code generated by the Chrysler design studios, Metalcrafters of Fountain Valley, California, constructed a duplicate prototype Challenger body in fiberglass and CFRP (carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic). But in this stage, it was a bare shell, an exoskeleton, rather like a Funny Car body or a plastic kit model. To turn the shell into a real car, the crew at Vehicle Build Shop Services and the Experimental Metal Shop at the Chrysler Technical Center in Auburn Hills, Michigan, went to work.



Vehicle Build Shop Services at the Chrysler Technical Center engineered and fabricated the six-point rollcage. Harnesses are by Simpson, while the seats are Dodge police car with snazzy custom covers by Katzkin. A Turbo Action Cheetah shifter bosses the TorqueFlite.They kicked off the job by pulling a brand-new, perfectly good Inferno Red Dodge Magnum 6.1L SRT8 out of inventory and then-oh, the horror-hacking it to pieces for its cowl and floorpan. The method seems wasteful, but actually it was far cheaper and quicker than tracking down all the hundreds of required components individually in the DCX global parts system. With 4 inches sectioned from the rear passenger floor to shorten the wheelbase from 120 inches to 116, the former Magnum wagon's unibody became the platform for the new Challenger.

The doors, hood, decklid surround rings, and interior panels all had to be hand-fabricated in 19-gauge steel and then bonded to the outer shell to make the Challenger look and function like a real production car. The prototype shop crew, all of them proud UAW skilled tradesmen, also made all the necessary tooling and then constructed the grille, dash, and interior panels, along with the molded front and rear lamp assemblies and "glass" (it's actually Lexan). To round out the neo-retro-futuristic approach to custom-car construction, computer-aided design (CAD) was used to create a six-point, 1.5-inch mild steel rollcage and to devise mounting boxes in the late-model floorpan to replace the IRS with a pair of good ol' Mopar Super Stock leaf springs and a Da