Car Grills
I love horsepower. I love the feel of it lingering underfoot, ready to explode into neck-snapping, stomach-churning, tire-shredding violence. I love the sound of it: the blend of Fortissississimo bellowing and heavy metal madness. I love the power of it, the ability to make "ordinary" machines look as if God grabbed their rear bumpers and yanked them backwards. Sure, my passion for accelerative overload is infantile, dangerous and about as politically correct as a 1920's minstrel show. But at least it isn't impractical or expensive. Well, not anymore.
You can now buy a four-door 425hp Chrysler 300C SRT-8 for a nickel under $40k. That's a lot of numbers. And no matter how you look at it– size, performance or style– the 300C SRT-8 is a lot of car. So let's take this road test thing nice and slow… Only we here at TTAC don't do anything "nice". And "slow" is not a word in the SRT-8's vocabulary (I have a hard time understanding it myself). So what the Hell. Let's strap in, mash the go pedal and see where it takes us.
Straight to the brake pedal. We've traveled so far so fast we need to slow down RIGHT NOW, and hope that Chrysler's Street and Racing Technology (SRT) knows as much about brakes as they do about big-bore powerplants. Fo shizzle. When caning a 425hp car weighing 4160lbs., there's no time to ponder the finer points of rotor size, "swept area", ABS, etc. It's strictly press and pray.
Did I mention that the 300C SRT-8 doesn't like to let go of its revs? Lift off the gas and there's no danger of engine braking; starving the 6.1-liter Hemi of dead dinoflagellates has about as much immediate effect as switching off the afterburners on an F15. Not to put too fine a point on it, the 300C SRT-8 is a blat - coast - blat kinda car. Oh, and the five-speed gearbox (a Mercedes E-Class hand-me-down) is as fond of kickdown as the Toyota Prius is of low revs. The big Chrysler can resist anything except acceleration.
Right. Where were we? Oh yes, in dire need of stoppage. And stop we shall. If a car is only as good as its brakes, Chrysler's flagship muscle car is a match for the very best. Both the SRT-8 and BMW's M5 require only 110 feet of pavement to slow themselves from sixty to zero. While the SRT-8's left pedal doesn't offer much in the way of initial feel, the massive anchors are powerful enough to yank you out of the trouble that the steroidal engine can oh-so-easily put you in. Now, let's try a little cornering…
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