If you’re going to take on a course that twists and jinks through 156 corners over 12.4 miles and encompasses more than 4,000 vertical feet of climb into the thin air, what kind of car do you require? First off, one with lots of rubber on the roadway. Second, one with an engine that can breathe effectively enough at high altitudes to continuously produce ground-quivering horsepower. The course described is this weekend’s Pikes Peak hillclimb in Colorado, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ weapon of choice is a one-of-one muscle sedan, the Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat Widebody.
Any Hemi-powered Dodge will go like stink, but FCA’s engineers came up with 3.5 inches of extra body width for the Widebody, which will contest the 97th running of the Climb to the Clouds in the Exhibition class. The additional bodywork allows the Charger Hellcat to mount 20-inch Toyo Proxes tires on 11-inch rims, providing additional potential grip on the now-fully paved course. The SRT suspension is augmented by Bilstein shock absorbers and Brembo brake calipers all the way around, with six pistons up front. The supercharged 6.2-liter Hellcat Hemi gets a racing exhaust system, but the Charger still retains its air conditioning compressor to keep it within the hillclimb’s stock parameters for the Exhibition class. The driver will be hillclimb and rally stud Randy Pobst, and will join a Challenger SRT Hellcat that’s entered to compete at Pikes Peak in the Track Attack 1 category.
Jim Donnelly On Wheels 