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The Dodge Viper has long had a reputation as a car that was more beast than machine, one that was difficult to tame either on a track or on the street.
With 600 horsepower in stock form, it’s hard to imagine anyone needing more power – or even being able to control more power were it to be made available.
Luckily for all the dreamers out there who are never satisfied with what they get off the show room floor, aftermarket performance guru John Hennessey has taken it upon himself to not only make the Viper’s motor more potent, but to help it stop and look better as well.
The Hennessey Venom 650R package adds 78 horsepower, 2 piece lightweight brake rotors and a sticker and badge package that identifies your Viper as the king snake on the block.
Costing only $11,500 over the sticker price of a standard 2008 Viper, the improved package is .2 seconds faster in the sprint to 60 miles per hour, achieving the feat in only 3.3 seconds.
The Viper Venom also runs 11.3 seconds in the quarter mile with a trap speed of 131 miles per hour and a top speed of 211 miles per hour, which bests the stock version’s 202.
These numbers might seem like incremental improvements, but at such high levels of performance, it is quite difficult to improve on the baseline numbers without significant investment in research and development.
Since Hennessey’s primary focus is Vipers, it should come as no surprise that this organization was able to step up and make these substantial gains.
There are two final points that make the 2008 Hennessey Viper Venom 650R so remarkable. One is that in order to increase the output of the 8.4 liter V10 engine, all Hennessey had to do was install a K&N air filter and design a custom exhaust system, complete with special exhaust headers, catalytic converters and mufflers.
That is how much power was waiting to be tapped inside the motor’s stock trim. The other interesting fact is that with a total price of $97 000, the 2008 Hennessey Viper Venom 650R looks like it will be able to outcompete its rival at General Motors – the Corvette ZR1 – at a much lower cost than the bowtie wearing supercar killer.
This alone should give many horsepower junkies pause this year when they try to decide how to spend their hard earned, tire-smoking dollars.