Dodge Viper: From concept to reality

In the 1980s, Chrysler was a boring place to work. Financial struggles throughout the Seventies had led to a reliance on U.S. Government loans to keep the wheels turning, and that in turn led to an increasingly beige and boxy product line-up that was almost exclusively perched atop the same K-car platform.

The trouble was, Chrysler was largely staffed by mavericks, the free-thinking people with radical ideas that other car companies didn’t like. When Ford fired Lee lacocca, it’s not surprising that’s where he ended up, and when “Maximum” Bob Lutz joined the renegades in 1986, the “band of misfits” was complete.

During a chance encounter in a corridor, Lutz’s suggestion that the AC Cobra’s muscle-bound formula deserved a reboot fell upon the receptive ears of design director Tom Gale. The voluptuous forms he sketched out were everything Chrysler’s K-cars weren’t, and when a hurriedly-constructed concept mock-up was unveiled to the public at the 1989 Detroit Auto Show, it was all anyone could talk about. Some questioned whether Chrysler had the balls to put it into production. Given the scale of the reaction from both public and press, perhaps a better question is whether they had the balls not to. They needn’t have worried, though; when Iacocca drove a prototype in 1990 he signed it off by asking the team simply: “what are you waiting for?”

Lutz appointed Roy Sjoberg chief engineer and gave him 36 months and $50 million – a tenth of what Chrysler had spent developing the Voyager minivan – to bring the Viper concept to reality. When Sjoberg organised a meeting to recruit engineers for the project, so many answered the call that they reportedly queued out the door. He hand-picked just 85 and then freed them from bureaucracy by authorising them to make their own decisions, in effect turning the Viper into an officially-sanctioned skunkworks project.

What emerged three years later was almost identical to the concept. The lights were slightly larger – and arguably better proportioned – but everything else remained, including the calf-singeing side pipes. The concept’s sense of simplicity survived, too, with no exterior door handles, no air conditioning, no airbags, and no ABS. The interior borrowed heavily from other Chrysler products, and while the 400hp 8.0-litre V10 was often derisorily dubbed a truck engine by many, its aluminium block was in fact developed by Lamborghini, then a Chrysler subsidiary. Its 630Nm of torque at 3,600rpm gave it supercar performance, too, accelerating from 0-60mph in not much more than four seconds. Massive 335/35R17 rear tyres gave it huge grip, but a relatively short wheelbase of 2.4 metres – shorter than the dowdy Dodge Neon it was sold alongside – meant it still demanded respect.

The Viper made its public debut as the official pace car at the 1991 Indianapolis 500 with none other than Carroll Shelby at the wheel, the great man having already declared it a worthy successor to the Cobra. Production began in Detroit in January 1992, a small team building around three cars a day to begin with.

It even came to the UK in 1993, where it appeared wearing a Chrysler badge, a rear-exit exhaust system instead of the side pipes, and a £55,000 price tag. Each one was supplied with a day’s track instruction courtesy of Justin Bell, proving that Chrysler had long since left ‘boring’ behind.

How do you think the Dodge Viper compares to the AC Cobra? Let us know in the comments!