The good folks over at the racing-focused ImportRace channel on YouTube love a good all-American Mopar versus GM showdown at the local quarter-mile dragstrip, especially if the protagonists have major tunes hiding in plain sight.
Curiously, it seems that Dodge Europe didn't get the memo about the production end of the Dodge Charger and Challenger late last year - they're all in with a new partnership featuring the WorldSBK Championship. They also don't seem to mind that Stellantis wants to retire the Hemi V8 as the Challenger SRT Hellcat, Durango SRT, and Durango Hellcats will be present throughout the season alongside their two-wheeled brethren at the WorldSBK events.
That's a nice way to go out with a bang, right? Meanwhile, General Motors doesn't have any thoughts of retiring the C8 Chevrolet Corvette or Cadillac's CT5 as it prepares for the arrival of the E-Ray across nationwide dealerships and the introduction of the Corvette ZR1 with turbo oomph. Meanwhile, the CT5 makes its CTS ancestor proud by signing out of 2023 as the luxury brand's top-selling nameplate worldwide. But what does a Challenger, Corvette, and Caddy sedan have to do with their recent market performance?
Well, we are about to discuss a different kind of performance – the one that makes crowds sing and tires burn ahead of the quarter-mile skirmish. So, the videographer captured yet another cool feature at the recent Street Car Takeover event organized by the Bradenton Motorsports Park in Florida. This time, we are not dealing with possibly the world's fastest Tesla-powered Honda Odyssey; instead, the feature centers around a Lime Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat tuned with nitrous as it faces the rising threat of a reworked Corvette and bonkers Caddy.
The action is quick, so you won't lose more than a minute of your life. The 'green-is-the-new-black' Challenger first races against the white C8 Chevy Corvette Stingray equipped with the Cicio Performance C900 package, giving it access to more than 800 horsepower. Irrespective of the 'Vette's wheelie attempt, that crazy Dodge was faster than Hell's flames, and the Chevrolet suddenly found itself obliterated via a mind-blowing 8.29s versus 10.23s victory.
Next up comes a fully-wrapped Cadillac CTS, and according to the description, this luxury sedan is now a supercharged monster that lives life one quarter-mile at a time, as Dom says. So, we were expecting even more great things from the pair, obviously. Although fast, this race was a tad disappointing at the very end – the nitrous-fed and Whipple-branded Challenger SRT Hellcat wasn't too consistent, and the supercharged Caddy also kept its wheelie tendencies well in check.
As it darted past the Christmas tree, it is evident that GM's maverick sedan was subtly faster than Mopar's knight on this particular occasion and the scoreboard showed the Caddy with a better 9.07s elapsed time versus Dodge's 9.35s performance. However, the track's lights again signaled the Mopar as the winner. Odd, right?
Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution. Full profile
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