Homemade 1,000-HP Twin-Turbo Scat Pack Drags Demon 170; It's Next Best Thing to Holy Water

Dodge might have sent the HEMI V8 into retirement, history books, car meets talks, and all the other wrong ways. Still, Mopar fans will have the last word about how a Challenger should behave. With the Last Calls all called out and accounted for, the only real solution to get more eight-cylinder fun out of (and in) a last-generation Challenger is to kick it up a notch or twenty, then pit it against Demons, Hellcats, or Demon 170s.

Here's the situation: a stock Demon 170 is a force of nature that only trained personnel should be allowed to handle or go head-to-head against. So, an eight-year-aged Scat Pack would quickly turn into a Snack Pack for the monstrous SRT iteration. But slap a pair of turbos on the 6.4-liter eight-pot, together with other hot internals (including, but not limited to, a 422 stroker kit), and suddenly, the 392 HEMI isn’t so old-fashioned anymore.

There is a YouTuber who did just that – in his own garage with his father because wrenching is a handed-down art passed from one generation to the next until there won’t be anything wrenchable left of Planet Piston. Wayne York is the man who put together a 6.9-liter (422 cubic inches) Scat Pack HEMI and installed some Hellion performance parts (read ‘turbocharging kit’) in the hope that one day, a Demon 170 will line up at the other side of a pro tree planted at the start line of a quarter-mile showdown.

Well, the day has finally arrived, and guess who picked the gauntlet? Herman Young from Demonology is never more than a burnout away from a good drag race, and this is exactly what everyone wants to see. Two extreme Challengers duke it out at Texas Motorplex because that’s what they were built to do – literally. But here’s where the two differ: while one was purpose-made by a team of engineers backed by Chrysler’s billions and infrastructure, the other was put together in a garage in South Carolina.

The Demon 170 was cleaved out of stardust and nine-second passes, while this particular Scat Pack build has come a long way from its stock form just to prove that a 6.4-liter HEMI can, indeed, handle boost. The YouTuber, who goes under the social media alias of B5Beast422, chose exhaust-gas-induced compression over crank-driven supercharging because he deems it more efficient than the horsepower-robbing, belt-actuated assembly found on the most performant Mopars of the third-generation HEMI.

There’s a long list of videos on Wayne York’s channel documenting his adventure of putting together this means Twin-Turbo Scat Pack derivative, but he doesn’t provide clear numbers about what matters most. Horsepower is quoted as being ‘1,000+ hp at the wheel,’ and that’s pretty much it for now.

It’s a long, very long way from the Challenger 392 HEMI Scat Pack and its 6.4-liter V8 engine, which came with 485 horsepower and 475 lb-ft of torque (492 PS, 644 Nm), 0-60 mph (97 kph) in the low 4-second range, and a top speed of 182 mph (293 kph).  The Demon 170 sees that stock output and raises it twofold: 1,025 hp (1,039 PS) and 945 lb-ft (1,281 Nm) from the factory, courtesy of a 3.0-liter supercharger running from the 6.2-liter HEMI V8.

Advertised by the manufacturer as capable of 1.66 seconds in the zero-to-sixty sprint and fit to cover the standing quarter-mile in under nine seconds (we’re still waiting on these claims to be backed by actual owner results), the Demon 170 is built for one purpose: to rule the dragstrip. More often than not, it gets things done, and this is one of those instances.

The following video is evidence enough that after-market tunning is not as reliable as tried-and-tested factory dial-ins, as the Demonology Demon 170 makes quick work of beating the turbo Scat Pack. In all fairness, Wayne York is still getting his car adjusted for peak performance (one quarter-mile at a time), so it wouldn’t be fair to say that this race is all there is to it.

While the race doesn’t show us the official Elapsed Times for each of the two, we can use the YouTube timeline to get an approximation. The Demon 170 crossed the line just shy of ten seconds after it left the line, and the Hellion-infused Scat Pack cousin was hot on its satanic relative’s heels. Not bad at all for a homemade racer built for around $11,000 (for the parts only, excluding tuning costs).