Mercedes-Benz S550 4MATIC

Mercedes-Benz S550 4MATIC Coupe

Raising the flag.

Take a good look at the new S-class coupe. That’s right, slow down and stop clicking your mouse or swiping your screen for a few seconds. The car is gorgeous, no? But photos don’t even capture its enormous size, its presence, its curves. It is not a supermodel, a waif of a sports car designed to appeal equally to gawking adolescents and those more chronologically advanced but equally insecure. This is a modern Mercedes, fully realized.

An extra second to remember the CL-class, please, that old lady of a coupe that’s been haunting Benz dealers for years now. Okay, done with that, no eulogy needed. Mercedes sold fewer than 500 of them last year. We won’t be surprised if it finds more buyers for the new B-pillarless S550 in the first month of sales, which likely will be October. Pricing has yet to be announced, but expect it to start near $120,000.

So, the S-class coupe is expensive, yes. As it should be, for a car that stands atop the Mercedes product range. Fire up the 4.7-liter twin-turbocharged V-8, and the exhaust rumbles louder than the S-class sedan’s, despite the fact that it’s the same engine making the same 449 horsepower and 516 lb-ft of torque. The coupe feelsquicker to accelerate, shift, and shed speed. Cutting 8.7 inches of wheelbase makes it a sportier proposition than the sedan, and when we finally get one on our scales, the coupe should be lighter by a couple hundred pounds, if Mercedes is to be believed. Sprinting through traffic in the land of Gucci, the S550 coupe feels more nimble than any CL ever has, despite measurements that track within a few inches of its predecessor’s in every dimension.

Like the sedan, the coupe has every manner of modern technology built in or ready for order. This is a car that can massage you while perfuming the air you breathe; that can drive itself for short bursts and brake for you when your attention falters. Its enormous glass roof can turn as opaque as the average driver’s understanding of the engineering that underlies these systems. Driving the S550 coupe, you almost feel sorry for the product planners and engineers, under such intense pressure to come up with One More Thing.

For the S-class coupe, that feature is “active curve tilting,” a function of the car’s active suspension system that works up to 112 mph. This predictive system scans the road up to 49 feet ahead with a stereoscopic camera and then hydraulically adjusts each spring perch independently to compensate for up to three inches of body motion versus the standard air suspension. Now, the caveat is that we’re not getting this technology on the S550 coupe (or the S63 AMG coupe) here in the U.S. Our cars will all be fitted with four-wheel drive, and active curve tilting is restricted to rear-drive cars.

That’s okay by us. Having driven a rear-drive S500 (European models wear different badging, but it’s the same car as our S550), we wouldn’t feel bad if someone called active curve tilting a gimmick. To be clear: We’re not. But we didn’t find the experience pleasurable, as it made handling unpredictable. And we don’t see the point in developing technology that purposely removes essential feedback from the driving experience. Thankfully, curve tilting can be turned off, and the Comfort and Sport settings of the ABC suspension deliver what they promise.

The interior of the S-class coupe is nearly indistinguishable from the sedan’s. A proper three-spoke steering wheel replaces the odd two-spoke unit in the sedan, and the coupe gets the new touch-pad controller for the infotainment system just like in the newest C-class. Our test car was fitted with the special “Edition 1” treatment, so its dashboard inserts resemble a vintage Telefunken radio, with flowing lines on a piano black background. A crystal nodule on the center console serves as the touch point to pop open the cover of the storage bin. Subtle but effective. Less understated are the Swarovski crystals available in the headlamp assemblies, 17 each in the daytime running lamps and 30 in the turn-signal indicators, although none in the LED headlights themselves.

The S-class coupe is every bit as regal as its sedan counterpart. Yet when you open one of the two four-and-a-half-foot-long doors and slide into the quilted leather seats, everything seems a bit more opulent. Maybe it’s the tidier four-place package or the steeper windshield rake. Or perhaps it’s just the aftereffect of staring at the exterior sheetmetal. What’s unquestionable is this car’s position as Stuttgart’s new flagship.

Porsche Panamera

 Porsche Panamera Turbo S Executive

All it needs is a "Screw You" bumper sticker.

Few automobiles so accurately channel the concept of f#@k everyone as the 2014 Porsche Panamera Turbo S Executive. Like the 707-hp Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat and the Mercedes-Benz G3 AMG, this Porsche’s extreme speed and incongruence with societal norms bestow upon owners a rarified and awesome offensiveness akin to, say, owning a strip club or being Bernie Ecclestone.

Let’s run down what takes the Panamera Turbo S Executive to that echelon.

There’s the sheer cost of the thing, which makes a perverse sort of sense given that the long-wheelbase Executive series was inserted into the Panamera lineup for 2014 (coinciding with a model-wide refresh) largely so that Porsche could charge more for a Panamera than ever before. In range-topping Turbo S guise, the Executive carries a suitably exclusive base price of $201,495. As they say, the devil is in the options, and extras floated our test car to $241,775.

Up next is gratuitous speed, provided here courtesy of a twin-turbocharged 4.8-liter V-8 shared with the regular-length Panamera Turbo S. The engine produces the same 570 horsepower and 590 lb-ft (increases of 50 and 22 over the Panamera Turbo), feeds it through Porsche’s seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission, and then to all four wheels. Curiously, the S takes 0.2-second longer than the less-powerful Turbo Executive to hit 60 mph—it still completes the deed in 3.5 seconds—but by 100 mph, the S pulls ahead. It hits 150 mph a full second quicker and eventually stops accelerating at 192 mph.

The coup de grâce, of course, is that the Turbo S Executive makes no practical or logical sense. Standing apart in the world of long-wheelbase luxury sedans, the Turbo S Executive demands that its rear-seat occupants strap into two full-blown sport seats with body-hugging and suit-wrinkling bolsters. Coddling doesn’t factor into the equation. There are no massaging seats. The longer wheelbase serves only to help the Panamera resemble Quasimodo after spending time on a medieval stretching rack and to create a whole lot more space for rear passengers to flail about while the driver explores the car’s reserve of 1.01 g’s of grip and ability to stop from 70 mph in 146 feet.

The über-un-limo does all of this while braaap braaaaaaping antisocially from its quad exhaust outlets, the trick three-part rear wing folding, tilting, and unfolding as speeds vary. Launch control is entertaining. There’s no neck snapping or chest compression—the event is damped like you’d expect in something that’s 203.4 inches long and weighs 4638 pounds. The Porsche simply lists onto its rear tires and shuffles off like a steroidal Cinderella chasing a wheeled pumpkin. Is it any surprise we averaged 12 mpg?

A wise man would take his quarter-of-a-million bucks and spend it on a 911 and aMercedes S550. The other guy, who we assume is Porsche’s target customer for this Panamera, doesn’t care if bystanders peg him as someone who bursts into dinner parties unannounced, pants-less, flipping two birds to the sky, and hollering for the hosts’ teenage daughter to come take a ride. Even when it wasn’t belching and farting around at a frenetic pace, the Porsche managed to piss people off. The cooling fans quit working during our test, so to avoid a total meltdown we had to nurse it back to our headquarters like a gigantic, traffic-clogging Prius, gingerly keeping it moving just fast enough to maintain airflow over the engine. The Turbo S even told us to shove it from its perch atop a flatbed, and we still loved it.

Dodge Charger Pursuit

 Dodge Charger Pursuit V-8 AWD

Prowling on all fours.

Driving a Dodge Charger Pursuit demonstrator painted to resemble a real police car, complete with operating lights and sirens, can be a strange experience, as we noted the last time we did this with a 2012 model. People—other drivers—assume things when they see it simply going down the road or when you stop for coffee or get gas.

One editor told us to “have fun” with the car. Another warned that, “It’s a felony to impersonate a police officer.” And a third just said, “Be careful . . . not everyone likes cops.”

Any tension we might have felt was broken the next morning, when a woman fed us the straight line as we walked from the parking lot into a breakfast joint. “Are you police?” she asked. And we got to say, Elwood Blues–style, “No ma’am. We’re musicians.”

Unlike the iconic Bluesmobile, this big Dodge was equipped with a Hemi V-8coupled to all-wheel drive, a combination no longer offered in the civilian Charger, mostly because few buyers wanted to pay the freight for both pricey options. (This combination has been dropped from the Chrysler 300, as well.)

Traction For The Law

All-wheel drive, though, enjoys rising popularity among police departments. Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine reports that this is one of those unintended consequences of change. It says that when Ford stopped making the most popular police cruiser/interceptor, the rear-drive Crown Victoria, the company offered fleet buyers their choice of either front- or all-wheel drive for its Taurus-based Police Interceptor sedan and Explorer-based P.I. Utility. When 97 percent of sales went all-wheel drive, Ford made that the standard setup. Now, Chevrolet with its Tahoe PPV (formerly rear-drive only) and Dodge with its Charger see expanding interest in all-wheel drive.

Having four driven wheels, police are finding, puts the power down more effectively and makes it easier to handle a car safely at speed. Fuel economy is not as good and maintenance costs can be higher, but automakers are pitching the safety, security, and all-weather ability—and fleets are buying.

Fast Enough for Government Work

In our tests, this Hemi/AWD Charger ran to 60 mph in 5.2 seconds on the way to a 13.8-second quarter-mile at 103 mph. Not Hellcat stuff, nor even SRT 392, but virtually identical to the rear-drive model in that 2012 test (5.2, 13.9 at 103). Like the civilian Charger, the versions offered to fleet buyers got restyled and received hardware upgrades for 2015—but not the eight-speed transmission. The cop model still has the five-speed automatic, designated as “autostick” by Dodge even though the lever is column-mounted (to leave room for computer and radio hardware between the seats) with a toggle to shift gears. If you’re thinking you could outrun this car, we have two words for you: “radio” and “helicopter.”

Charger Pursuit cars get a heavy-duty suspension with rear load-leveling, performance-tuned electrohydraulic power steering with a fluid cooler, a 220-amp alternator and 800-amp battery, heavy-duty disc brakes with police-tuned ABS, and severe-duty engine cooling—you know, that whole “cop motor, cop tires, cop suspension” thing. The steering feels solid, as do the brakes, like serious hardware. At the track, we stopped from 70 mph in 174 feet and circled the skidpad at 0.85 g on Goodyear Eagle RS-A all-season tires, size 225/60R-18. Not impressive numbers unless you take into account the Charger’s 4579-pound curb weight and its relatively comfortable ride.

The base sticker on a Hemi/AWD edition is $36,795; our test car had various options lifting it to $40,875. The biggest chunk was $2000 for the Base Prep Police package. That’s the wiring and support for lights, sirens, and speakers. Our car also had power seats, adjustable pedals, a backup camera, and the (standard) UConnect interface. Yeah, it was easy to connect our phone via Bluetooth. But there’s no navigation on the five-inch touch screen, because the police are going to install a laptop on the console between the two front buckets anyway. It’d be easy to make fat-cop/donut jokes about those wide, flat seats, but they’re that way because even a skinny officer has a belt-load of gear—radio, weapon(s), handcuffs, flashlights, and more—to maneuver around when getting in and out.

The overriding impression from driving the Charger Pursuit a few hundred miles was that it was predictable, steady, and quick, and we could imagine piloting it for a long time without getting unduly fatigued. Like any professional tool, the Charger Pursuit is tailored to its mission. All-wheel drive might help it perform that mission, but we can imagine one downside: If this trend toward AWD continues, movie-makers might have to show fewer lurid, power-oversteer slides in their police-chase scenes. They’ll have to find a way around that—or just ignore reality—if they’re ever going to make Blues Brothers 2020.

Dodge Challenger

 Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack 6.4L Automatic

Quicker than the manual and just as beastly.

The performance-car world has turned a corner. It’s a corner that, for a long time, those of us who savor engaging one’s left leg and right arm to shift gears have been reluctant to admit even exists: In most instances, no objective case can be made for choosing a manual over an automatic when it comes to performance. Automatic gearboxes have improved so much that oftentimes they are both more fuel-efficient and quicker than their manual counterparts. Curse you, technology!

The latest example of this reality is the 2015 Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack, one of the more beastly muscle cars to ever have leapt from a Detroit-based engineering department. Sharing its naturally aspirated, 392-cubic-inch pushrod V-8 (Dodge likes to cite the displacement in cubic inches because heritage!) with the pricier, somewhat higher-tech SRT 392 model, the R/T Scat Pack comes with a choice of a six-speed Tremec TR6060 manual or, for $1400 more, an eight-speed paddle-shifted TorqueFlite automatic. We tested the manual version a few months ago, and that car also lost a three-way comparison test with a Ford Mustang GT and a Chevrolet Camaro SS 1LE, yet this Challenger impressed us with its brute force, bad-ass attitude, and ear-shredding exhaust note. The automatic version, it turns out, is actually quite satisfying to drive, too.

One Mississippi, Two Mississippi . . .

First, the numbers. We blasted to 60 mph in a blistering 4.2 seconds, hit triple-digit speeds in 9.6 seconds, and passed the quarter-mile mark in 12.6 seconds at 114 mph. The manual Scat Pack hit those same benchmarks in 4.4 seconds, 10.2 seconds, and 12.9 seconds at 113 mph. The improvement is in no part attributable to the Scat Pack’s programmable launch control, which is part of the standard Performance Pages app. Our test driver, senior editor Tony Quiroga, noted that, regardless of how low he set launch rpm using the system, some tenths were lost to excess wheelspin. The best way to launch, we found, is simply to ease into the throttle through first gear, dipping deeper as second engages and resisting the urge to mash the pedal until you’re midway through second gear. Otherwise, it’s a cloudy day in the neighborhood.

The transmission itself is a honey, as we’ve noted in our reviews of other vehicles that use it. Demure as a housecat in its default settings and bordering on violent in its more aggressive settings, the ZF-designed TorqueFlite eight-speed unit delivers satisfyingly quick and rev-matched downshifts at the tug of the left paddle. It’s not quite as speedy to swap ratios as a dual-clutch automatic, but it’s far from your typical slushbox. We give serious kudos to Dodge’s engineers for tuning this transmission to match the raucous personality of the Hemi underhood.

For what it’s worth, we expect that the launch control would come in handy on an actual drag strip, especially with slicks, but we test in conditions more like those you’d find in the real world. Still, 4.2 seconds to 60 is pretty damn good for a 4261-pound full-size two-door sedan—which is essentially what the Challenger is. Just as impressive are the Brembo brakes (with four-piston calipers at each corner), which yank the big guy down to a stop from 70 mph in just 154 feet.

The Scat Pack’s throttle is also quite touchy even with the powertrain in its most docile setting, regularly provoking the same wheelspin we experienced at the test track. This is less of a problem for us, but it becomes worrisome when we think about valets screeching backward into parking spots. And when the roads get slippery, well, suffice it to say that the Scat Pack is a fair-weather friend.

The Challenger Scat Pack can turn surprisingly well, too, thanks to quick steering (just 2.3 turns lock-to-lock) that can be dialed up both in terms of effort and feel via the Performance Pages. But be sure you know how to catch a slide before you turn off the stability control, as the 245/45 Goodyear Eagle F1 Supercar tires generated 0.90 g of lateral grip on our skidpad; that’s a decent number, but it’s not so sticky that the rear won’t break loose fairly easily under power. Even when that happens, though, the body remains heroically flat thanks to a stiffened suspension. We noted moderate understeer on the level skidpad, but if you’re heading downhill on, say, a mountain road, it’s best to respect the fact that 55 percent of the car’s mass is riding over the front wheels—and that this Dodge is all too happy to push your line wide.

Adding It Up

While the automatic Scat Pack starts at $39,890, this particular example was loaded with options, including radar cruise control and other driving aids, navigation, a sunroof, upgraded speakers, and the $1995 Appearance group (including blackout trim, black 20-inch wheels, and bumblebee stripes). It also had a red-and-black faux-suede and leather interior that contrasted dramatically with its stormy gray paint.

The sticker thus had an eye-watering bottom-line price of $47,360, a few hundred bucks more than the $46,990 SRT 392. For that kind of coin, we might recommend stepping up to a basic SRT 392, if only to get the adjustable Bilstein shocks—they keep the car buttoned down in corners but also impart a far more highway-friendly ride. The 392 also has stronger brakes and comes with a complimentary day of driver training.

While the Challenger R/T Scat Pack is heavy no matter what transmission you choose, and the automatic is unlikely to change the car’s standing in the aforementioned comparison test, it is a very fast and charismatic muscle car that delivers on every promise made by its bodacious styling. We dig it.

Dodge Charger

 Dodge Charger R/T Scat Pack

Power to the proletariat.

Dodge knows a good thing when it has it. And we’d argue that its 485-hp 6.4-liter Hemi V-8 is a very good thing. Dodge is making that good thing more widely available by putting it into another model—the Charger R/T, this time—and lowering the price of entry. Power to the proletariat!

“We’re now putting the 6.4 at a price point people can afford,” said Dodge exec Bob Broderdorf. “Not everyone can get a Hellcat. Not everyone can get an SRT. But we want to make sure that that performance element is there. And I think Scat Pack does that.”

Fewer Frills

We would agree. As with its coupe counterpart, the Challenger R/T Scat Pack, the Charger R/T Scat Pack is just as heavy on the power as the SRT 392 model but goes a bit lighter on the frills. Some of the SRT 392’s amenities, like leather upholstery, heated front and rear seats, a power-adjustable steering column, and HID headlamps, move to the options list. The SRT’s computer-adjustable Bilstein dampers give way to fixed-rate Bilsteins, and the front brake rotors shrink slightly to 14.2 inches with four-piston Brembo grabbers, down from the 15.4-inch/six-piston Brembos on the SRT 392. The 20-inch wheels change in design but not in diameter, although tire width drops considerably from the SRT’s 275/40 Pirelli P Zeros to 245/45 Goodyear RS-A all-seasons, with Goodyear F1 Supercar rubber optional. Styling is virtually identical, however, save for the Scat Pack’s black rear spoiler and Scat Pack grille badge.

Inside, the SRT’s rad, flat-bottom steering wheel is replaced by a so-called “performance” flat-ish-bottom wheel, which has a thick, contoured rim and perforated leather, and the gray fabric seats feature the Scat Pack bee on the front seatbacks. A unique Scat Pack “splash screen” comes on at startup in the instrument cluster, too. Best of all, the Dodge Performance Pages—and launch control—are present and accounted for. Hoping for lower weight with the (slightly) lower-rent decor? Sorry, but Dodge claims that the 4400-pound Scat Pack is only 10 pounds lighter than the SRT 392.

Light ’Em Up

Still, like the SRT 392, the Scat Pack feels spectacularly quick. From a stoplight, it remains oh-so-easy to light up the optional three-season Goodyears, skinny as they are with only 245 mm of width, though the rear end hooks up quite quickly with a more judicious application of the gas pedal. Throttle response sharpens and the transmission shifts quicken with a touch of the “Sport” button on the lower dash, and manual shifts are summoned with a tug on the zinc paddles. All the while, the Scat Pack shrieks with the same banshee wail we’ve come to love from anything wearing the SRT badge.

Dodge claims that 60 mph is attainable in the mid-to-high four-second range, with the quarter-mile mark passing in the mid-12s. We think that’s a bit coy. Oh yeah, and Dodge claims that the Charger Scat Pack can top out at 175 mph.

While our first drive was only about 40 miles, much of it took place along California’s entertaining Ortega Highway (Highway 74). From that limited exposure, we learned that the car stays quite flat around bends and holds on in corners until understeer takes over at the limit (blame the heavy Hemi for a 54/46-percent weight distribution, per Chrysler’s scales). The ride is firm, but we observed none of the brittleness of the Challenger Scat Pack models we’ve sampled before. Clearly, the sedan’s longer wheelbase has its benefits.As in the SRT 392, steering feel is one of the Scat Pack’s best attributes, while the formidable torque makes it easy to break the rear wheels loose for some steer-with-the-rear shenanigans, although the long wheelbase ensures that the back end doesn’t come around too fast, making it eminently catchable in corners. Braking, too, is impressive, with excellent pedal feel and powerful response—Dodge claims that braking to a stop from 60 mph happens in less than 120 feet, truly impressive for a car of this size.While the Scat Pack’s $40,990 starting price is $7390 less than the $48,380 SRT 392, adding things like a sunroof, leather upholstery, and ventilated seats can close the price gap such that you might consider springing for the grippier, better-equipped SRT 392 if you want stuff like adjustable shocks and supercar-grade brakes. Keep it simple, however, and the Charger Scat Pack is a screaming performance deal that is plenty entertaining itself.

 Dodge Viper ACR

To make a Viper go faster, you have to make it slower. Wait—what?

The 2016 Dodge Viper ACR is the fastest Viper around a racetrack—at least that’s what Dodge claims—but a 177-mph top speed makes it the slowest Viper. With the exception of a finned differential for cooling, the ACR’s drivetrain is identical to that found in the rest of the Viper lineup. That means an 8.4-liter V-10 that throbs out 645 horsepower and 600 lb-ft of torque and looks to be about the size of a steamer trunk. What makes the Viper ACR faster around a racetrack is also what reduces its straight-line speed—downforce.

Downforce uses air for the very noble purpose of pushing a car down into the earth. The harder the air pushes the car into the tarmac, the faster the car can corner. But downforce also creates aerodynamic drag, which slows down a car at the top end. Imagine an upside-down set of airplane wings strapped to the roof of a Viper and you have a decent idea of how it works.

Wings on Wings on Wings—Plus Other Stuff

By default, a huge adjustable wing is bolted to the Viper ACR’s trunklid, a massive front splitter gives the car an underbite, the front bumper is flanked by a dive-plane moustache, fender vents perched above the front tires reduce lift, and a rear diffuser cuts the air like a mandolin slicer. Opt for the ACR Extreme package, however, and the wing, splitter, and diffuser all grow, making them even more effective and pushing the ACR harder into the asphalt—to the tune of 2000 pounds of downforce at its 177-mph top speed. The penalty comes in terms of the stated drag coefficient, which is 0.54 for the ACR Extreme versus 0.37 for the regular Viper SRT and 0.43 for the Viper TA.

We drove the Viper ACR Extreme at Virginia International Raceway a month after conducting the ninth iteration of our Lightning Lap test on the same premises, the results of which will be published in the coming weeks. We didn’t get to time our laps or record any telemetry, but we’re confident that the ACR is several seconds quicker around the 4.1-mile-long course than the Viper TA we tested for Lightning Lap at VIR last year, a car that ran a 2:49.9.

Although the aerodynamic package is a major component of what makes the ACR what it is, there are other new pieces of hardware included in the car’s $122,490 MSRP. Larger carbon-ceramic brakes that measure 15.4 inches (1.4 inches larger than before) with six-piston calipers in front necessitated bigger, 19-inch front wheels (one inch larger than standard). The rear wheels hide 14.2-inch carbon-ceramic rotors with four-piston calipers.

To make the most of the downforce and the braking power, the ACR wears new tires developed specifically for this application. Development on the rubber started two years ago, which is when Dodge approached Kumho; the result is the Ecsta V720. A near slick, the Kumhos have a few superficial grooves molded into them to make them nominally street-legal. The rear tires remain sized 355/30R-19, but while the front tires are the same 295 width as on other Vipers, they have a section height of 25 against the regular car’s 30s.

On the Track

The coil-over suspension features radically stiffer springs with height-adjustable perches, as well as adjustable shocks that can be tuned for rebound and jounce. What we noticed at VIR is that the ACR is more stable, less prone to spastic leaps off the curbs, and easier to drive fast than the TA we lapped last year.

For one, the ACR doesn’t react to every steering-wheel movement with the jerk of a leg that’s been hit in the knee with a rubber mallet. It’s much slower to nose into a corner, possibly too slow. To show the adjustability of the ACR, Dodge engineers on hand dialed back the rear wing slightly and removed the front fender louvers. We didn’t have a lot of laps with the new setup, but it did gain some front-end grip. Again, we couldn’t quantify anything, but suddenly we felt like we could turn in with more accuracy and that we weren’t going fast enough in VIR’s many long, sweeping corners.

On the long straight, the winged ACR hit an indicated 147 mph going into the braking zone. In the wingless Viper TA we saw 152.1 mph. With less speed on the straight, the ACR’s grippier tires and huge binders allowed us to brake later and with greater confidence. We did notice that the nose would dive enough to plow the front splitter into the tarmac when braking hard into one uphill section of the track. Brake as hard as you want, though, as the splitter is designed to be easily replaceable.

But don’t get the idea that the ACR is an easy car to drive quickly. It’s definitely worthy of its Viper name, and it takes a lot of laps to get used to the ACR’s grip. Going fast requires a few things of the driver: The car wants to be pointed straight when you’re hard on the brakes or the tail will wag, the shifter still needs to be strong-armed into gear, and making meaningful downforce requires big speed. At VIR, the big speed is demanded of you in the most pucker-intensive corners of the track. But it’s the speed and the cornering limits that are daunting; the car’s behavior is predictable as long as you don’t do anything stupid.

Dodge is selling a race car that you can put a plate on. It might be street-legal, but we can’t tell you what the Viper ACR was like to drive on the road—Dodge kept us on the track with the ACR, a clear indication of its mission. Driving it among Nissan Versas and the like would have been frustrating, because going slow on a track is still more fun than trying to find ways to go fast on the street. In much the same way that this “slower” ACR is more fun than its “faster” Viper brethren.