GTSRboy2000
Enthusiast
I came across this Audi R8 vs Viper article, i think you guys will really like it, this guy really gets the viper, unlike most people.
Make no mistake, the R8 packs a true supercar punch around MSR. Tuned-up C5 Vettes and club racers found themselves quickly yielding to the angry-faced Audi; even if they had power and grip to match Roboto’s aluminum bullet, there was no answer possible to the mid-engined transition response in fast sections and the R. tronic’s exit punch in tight corners. It’s a world-class road-course car – one capable of rolling down the freeway home in a manner to rival the best German full-size sedans. There’s nothing in the world to match its combination of talents. Frankly, I’d have no problem naming it as that oft-argued “Best Car In The World”, right here, right now.
But it isn’t the best track car in the world. It isn’t even the best track car in this test. That honor goes to the 2008 Dodge Viper SRT-10. The reason is easy to spot; it lies beneath the hood of our blue convertible, nearly entirely behind the front axle, in a position that a more marketing-obsessed company would call “front-mid-engined” or some such nonsense. The infamous Viper V-10 has been making headlines, scaring passengers, and offending decent people on the street for seventeen years now, but with this new 8.4 liter, variable-valve-timing variant, it finally reaches the status of Greatest Street Car Engine In The World. There’s no longer any dispute possible. The devotees of Porsche, Ferrari, Corvette, et al have always given grudging respect to the Viper’s twisty torque and solid slug of mid-range power… with a snide aside to the effect of “Well, it doesn’t rev” or some similar condemnation, delivered with a wink and a nod. “Just a truck engine, really.”
http://www.speedsportlife.com/2008/...8-and-viper-against-the-clock-at-msr-houston/
Those days are over, pal. The Viper can now rev – and rev it does, launching the Viper down the track as if the world’s largest rubberband were fixed to the front bumper. The 2005 Viper felt strong from idle but became breathless past 4500rpm, like a World’s Strongest Man competitor forced to run a mile against his will. The new car is stronger than ever from the left side of the tach – and now it can run to the limiter effortlessly, opening its lungs and screaming to 6200rpm without the merest suggestion that, yes, an early shift wouldn’t hurt. Forget that. Don’t short-shift the ’08 – you will miss out on the majesty of six hundred horsepower and the fearsome redline rush that accompanies our most indecent sports-car fantasies.
So the engine’s a winner. What about the chassis? As noted before, it’s virtually a mid-engined car, despite the defiantly cab-backwards design. In the first few laps around MSR, I probe delicately at the chassis, trying to gain a sense of the available grip. Under that broad, unforgiving Texas sky, the Viper is in no hurry to cooperate. The steering’s dead, the shifter balky. Over the course of the day, I repeatedly received fifth gear when I believed myself to be grabbing third; only after thirty or laps did I finally perfect the relatively humble art of shifting the reluctant box. We’ll have to up the pace a bit if the Viper’s true character is to shine through…
…and once we do, the street-rod veneer falls away and the sports car beneath is revealed. The steering wheel comes alive, the brakes are revealed to be steady and dependable, and the big power behind the grinning-snake badge becomes accessible. “Slow your hands down”, Michael Mills tells me, and he’s right – I’m trying to fight the Viper into submission. Relax, drive it like the world’s biggest, fastest Miata. Let the engine slide the tail in the tight sections, and the SRT-10 turns in magical fashion. The R8 is ahead of me, with Hardage at the wheel. He’s at the limit, the suspension squirming and the rear end dancing around a few inches at a time in tune with the rising and falling revs from the direct-injection V8. It’s a masterful performance, a real lesson in how the top drivers communicate with their cars, but from the driver’s seat of the Viper it’s slo-mo. I can drive by at any point I choose. Not just the straights, where the extra one hundred and eighty-six horsepower makes any drag race a farce, but in the corners as well. The Viper simply has more tire and far less understeer. Far less? More like none, thanks to the instant attitude adjustment available from the rumbling V-10. Around the sharp, slow “Diamond’s Edge”, the Viper ***** the Audi up effortlessly and I’m forced to short-shift to prevent an inadvertent bump-draft. It isn’t until we get to Turn One, the wicked, high-speed left-right combination, that the Audi shows the purity of its chassis, Hardage driving through with just a soupcon of drift while I struggle to keep the Viper out of the guardrail.
I pull in for a few moments to chat with our team of local heroes. They’re tossing around the idea of a 1:46 lap, and of speeds well beyond anything the R8 can see. The Audi’s good for slightly over 125 on the back straight. What can the Viper do? Time to find out.
All pretense of “taking it easy” disappears now; it’s time to drive the car for real. Here’s where things get tricky. The Audi has a safety net of expertly programmed traction and stability control systems. Even when they’re turned off, as they were for Mr. Roboto’s timed laps, it appears that they might cut back in if things get really shaky. By contrast, the Viper has nothing to protect the incompetent, the untalented, or the simply unlucky. There’s no ESP, ASC, DSC, ATTESA, or any of the alphabet-soup garbage forced on us by a committee of lawyers and engineers. There’s no four-wheel drive, no traction-sensing center differential, no cunning arrangement of passive-steer geometry. There’s only the car, and six hundred horsepower, a lap timer, and me. If I make a mistake, I’ll be on my own.
Which brings me to the beginning of this story. I knew the Viper could make 140 down the back straight, but after just three laps I found myself knocking on 142, then 143, then 144. What was possible? Was a 1:45 lap out there for the taking? The lunchtime had come and gone, and the track pulsed with traffic. There was no clear lap to be had. Still the Viper pressed on, casually dispatching everything in its path. Corvettes? No problem. A Porsche GT3 made an attempt to stay ahead; I swatted him emotionlessly with the throttle, sucking him into the Viper’s cruciform intake and leaving him bobbing in the wake of my passage. Faster and faster we went, the Viper now whispering to me instead of screaming, the information coming through my hands and feet clearer and clearer, showing me the way to go, until I looked down on the entrance to Turn Six and the speedometer showed me a proud sliver of space above the one hundred and forty-five mile-per-hour mark. I tapped the brake lightly as we went in – as lightly as I could, knowing that I needed to shed nearly fifty mph by the clipping point – and the world went sideways.
I thought. I thought about being home. I thought about the talk I would have with the wonderful people at Dodge who had entrusted us with this car despite the tendency of The Press As A Whole to send press-fleet Vipers into bridge abutments and oncoming traffic. I thought about surviving the impact. MSR has plenty of runoff, but I didn’t know if it had enough runoff for this one. I thought about pride. It’s a killer, that pride, and nothing instills it quicker or in more deadly fashion than being at the wheel of a car which appears able to bend time and space with a single squeeze of the throttle. I knew the mistake I had made – I’d trail-braked too deeply, with too much steering applied, at speeds beyond what I’d seen in the corner before. Such a simple error! This is what I thought. A simple error.
While I thought, my body was doing something else. In fact, it was doing just what it’s done hundreds of times before on-track in situations like this; easing off the brake, catching the oscillations, lightly pedaling the accelerator to remove the profound engine-braking effect of eight point four liters of Viper V-10. And while I thought, and watched, the car did just what it was supposed to do. It went straight. Before I could blink again – before another sixty feet could pass – we were accelerating out of Turn Six down towards Diamond’s Edge. And in that moment, I thought about a six-hundred-horsepower supercar that could be tossed, and caught, at one hundred and forty-five miles per hour as reliably as a Camaro-Mustang-Challenge race car could be at ninety, and I fell in love. Before I reached the carousel, I was hooked, any pretense of impartiality tossed to the winds. I’d placed my life in the Viper’s hands, and it had returned my life to me, and the timer flashed 1:47.1 as I blitzed the start-finish line and waved to the folks in the pit crew. It was time to bring it in, time to hand it over to Mr. Roboto for the real fast laps, time to say goodbye.
I didn’t hurry back in.
We’d like to have another full set of data for you from MSR on the Viper, but the bad luck I’d evaded out in Turn Six struck our Traqmate instead. The G-sensor had become detached, causing the system to shut down. Luckily for us, the MSR people were hand-timing the SRT-10 during the serious laps. How fast did it go? A low 1:46, easy, in traffic. What’s the potential for the car? Well, that’s the best part. For most modern supercars, the limit is measured in terms of the traction control, the clutch engagement speed, the power-shifting capability of the differentials. You drive to the limit of the computers and the engineers, and that’s the limit.
The R8 shows us a better way – it has traction control, and it has four-wheel-drive, but it also has a perfect chassis layout, a sweet balance, and a high-revving engine which rewards every extra tenth of a second you can squeeze out before the corner entry. It’s not a computer car. It’s not made for the feckless masses. It’s a serious driver’s sweetheart that just happens to be wrapped in a stunning body and sumptuous interior. You’re faster in the R8 with the safety net dialed back, which is as it should be.
In the Viper, there’s no safety net, no limits. We’ll never know what the Viper is truly capable of, because it would take a perfect driver to get that time. The Viper gives you as much as you put into it. All the talent, all the effort, all the courage you possess – the Viper takes it and delivers results beyond your expectations, but it never tricks you into thinking you’ve seen all it has to offer. You could drive the Viper around MSR for every one of those thirty weekends a year, for the rest of your life, and you would never find the very last hundredth of a second. Other supercars represent accomplishment, in the fiscal, engineering, or marketing sense. The Viper represents challenge. You might get tired of being stared at every time you fill up, you might grow weary of hearing people talking about your mid-life crisis, you might even come to dislike the smell of hot fiberglass which greets you at the end of every session – but you will never, ever, grow weary of driving this car as it was meant to be driven. And for that reason, it wins the on-track portion of this shootout.
Stay with us this week, as we’ll bring you Parts Two and Three of the Supercar Saturday. In Part Two, we’ll take the R8 and Viper to the freeway, the streets, and a highly dodgy-looking “storage garage” in downtown Houston. In Part Three, we’ll show you the videos we took of the on-track action and try to figure out which car we’d buy with our money. It’s not an easy choice, and we think you’ll be surprised at the results. See you soon!
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Make no mistake, the R8 packs a true supercar punch around MSR. Tuned-up C5 Vettes and club racers found themselves quickly yielding to the angry-faced Audi; even if they had power and grip to match Roboto’s aluminum bullet, there was no answer possible to the mid-engined transition response in fast sections and the R. tronic’s exit punch in tight corners. It’s a world-class road-course car – one capable of rolling down the freeway home in a manner to rival the best German full-size sedans. There’s nothing in the world to match its combination of talents. Frankly, I’d have no problem naming it as that oft-argued “Best Car In The World”, right here, right now.
But it isn’t the best track car in the world. It isn’t even the best track car in this test. That honor goes to the 2008 Dodge Viper SRT-10. The reason is easy to spot; it lies beneath the hood of our blue convertible, nearly entirely behind the front axle, in a position that a more marketing-obsessed company would call “front-mid-engined” or some such nonsense. The infamous Viper V-10 has been making headlines, scaring passengers, and offending decent people on the street for seventeen years now, but with this new 8.4 liter, variable-valve-timing variant, it finally reaches the status of Greatest Street Car Engine In The World. There’s no longer any dispute possible. The devotees of Porsche, Ferrari, Corvette, et al have always given grudging respect to the Viper’s twisty torque and solid slug of mid-range power… with a snide aside to the effect of “Well, it doesn’t rev” or some similar condemnation, delivered with a wink and a nod. “Just a truck engine, really.”
http://www.speedsportlife.com/2008/...8-and-viper-against-the-clock-at-msr-houston/
Those days are over, pal. The Viper can now rev – and rev it does, launching the Viper down the track as if the world’s largest rubberband were fixed to the front bumper. The 2005 Viper felt strong from idle but became breathless past 4500rpm, like a World’s Strongest Man competitor forced to run a mile against his will. The new car is stronger than ever from the left side of the tach – and now it can run to the limiter effortlessly, opening its lungs and screaming to 6200rpm without the merest suggestion that, yes, an early shift wouldn’t hurt. Forget that. Don’t short-shift the ’08 – you will miss out on the majesty of six hundred horsepower and the fearsome redline rush that accompanies our most indecent sports-car fantasies.
So the engine’s a winner. What about the chassis? As noted before, it’s virtually a mid-engined car, despite the defiantly cab-backwards design. In the first few laps around MSR, I probe delicately at the chassis, trying to gain a sense of the available grip. Under that broad, unforgiving Texas sky, the Viper is in no hurry to cooperate. The steering’s dead, the shifter balky. Over the course of the day, I repeatedly received fifth gear when I believed myself to be grabbing third; only after thirty or laps did I finally perfect the relatively humble art of shifting the reluctant box. We’ll have to up the pace a bit if the Viper’s true character is to shine through…
…and once we do, the street-rod veneer falls away and the sports car beneath is revealed. The steering wheel comes alive, the brakes are revealed to be steady and dependable, and the big power behind the grinning-snake badge becomes accessible. “Slow your hands down”, Michael Mills tells me, and he’s right – I’m trying to fight the Viper into submission. Relax, drive it like the world’s biggest, fastest Miata. Let the engine slide the tail in the tight sections, and the SRT-10 turns in magical fashion. The R8 is ahead of me, with Hardage at the wheel. He’s at the limit, the suspension squirming and the rear end dancing around a few inches at a time in tune with the rising and falling revs from the direct-injection V8. It’s a masterful performance, a real lesson in how the top drivers communicate with their cars, but from the driver’s seat of the Viper it’s slo-mo. I can drive by at any point I choose. Not just the straights, where the extra one hundred and eighty-six horsepower makes any drag race a farce, but in the corners as well. The Viper simply has more tire and far less understeer. Far less? More like none, thanks to the instant attitude adjustment available from the rumbling V-10. Around the sharp, slow “Diamond’s Edge”, the Viper ***** the Audi up effortlessly and I’m forced to short-shift to prevent an inadvertent bump-draft. It isn’t until we get to Turn One, the wicked, high-speed left-right combination, that the Audi shows the purity of its chassis, Hardage driving through with just a soupcon of drift while I struggle to keep the Viper out of the guardrail.
I pull in for a few moments to chat with our team of local heroes. They’re tossing around the idea of a 1:46 lap, and of speeds well beyond anything the R8 can see. The Audi’s good for slightly over 125 on the back straight. What can the Viper do? Time to find out.
All pretense of “taking it easy” disappears now; it’s time to drive the car for real. Here’s where things get tricky. The Audi has a safety net of expertly programmed traction and stability control systems. Even when they’re turned off, as they were for Mr. Roboto’s timed laps, it appears that they might cut back in if things get really shaky. By contrast, the Viper has nothing to protect the incompetent, the untalented, or the simply unlucky. There’s no ESP, ASC, DSC, ATTESA, or any of the alphabet-soup garbage forced on us by a committee of lawyers and engineers. There’s no four-wheel drive, no traction-sensing center differential, no cunning arrangement of passive-steer geometry. There’s only the car, and six hundred horsepower, a lap timer, and me. If I make a mistake, I’ll be on my own.
Which brings me to the beginning of this story. I knew the Viper could make 140 down the back straight, but after just three laps I found myself knocking on 142, then 143, then 144. What was possible? Was a 1:45 lap out there for the taking? The lunchtime had come and gone, and the track pulsed with traffic. There was no clear lap to be had. Still the Viper pressed on, casually dispatching everything in its path. Corvettes? No problem. A Porsche GT3 made an attempt to stay ahead; I swatted him emotionlessly with the throttle, sucking him into the Viper’s cruciform intake and leaving him bobbing in the wake of my passage. Faster and faster we went, the Viper now whispering to me instead of screaming, the information coming through my hands and feet clearer and clearer, showing me the way to go, until I looked down on the entrance to Turn Six and the speedometer showed me a proud sliver of space above the one hundred and forty-five mile-per-hour mark. I tapped the brake lightly as we went in – as lightly as I could, knowing that I needed to shed nearly fifty mph by the clipping point – and the world went sideways.
I thought. I thought about being home. I thought about the talk I would have with the wonderful people at Dodge who had entrusted us with this car despite the tendency of The Press As A Whole to send press-fleet Vipers into bridge abutments and oncoming traffic. I thought about surviving the impact. MSR has plenty of runoff, but I didn’t know if it had enough runoff for this one. I thought about pride. It’s a killer, that pride, and nothing instills it quicker or in more deadly fashion than being at the wheel of a car which appears able to bend time and space with a single squeeze of the throttle. I knew the mistake I had made – I’d trail-braked too deeply, with too much steering applied, at speeds beyond what I’d seen in the corner before. Such a simple error! This is what I thought. A simple error.
While I thought, my body was doing something else. In fact, it was doing just what it’s done hundreds of times before on-track in situations like this; easing off the brake, catching the oscillations, lightly pedaling the accelerator to remove the profound engine-braking effect of eight point four liters of Viper V-10. And while I thought, and watched, the car did just what it was supposed to do. It went straight. Before I could blink again – before another sixty feet could pass – we were accelerating out of Turn Six down towards Diamond’s Edge. And in that moment, I thought about a six-hundred-horsepower supercar that could be tossed, and caught, at one hundred and forty-five miles per hour as reliably as a Camaro-Mustang-Challenge race car could be at ninety, and I fell in love. Before I reached the carousel, I was hooked, any pretense of impartiality tossed to the winds. I’d placed my life in the Viper’s hands, and it had returned my life to me, and the timer flashed 1:47.1 as I blitzed the start-finish line and waved to the folks in the pit crew. It was time to bring it in, time to hand it over to Mr. Roboto for the real fast laps, time to say goodbye.
I didn’t hurry back in.
We’d like to have another full set of data for you from MSR on the Viper, but the bad luck I’d evaded out in Turn Six struck our Traqmate instead. The G-sensor had become detached, causing the system to shut down. Luckily for us, the MSR people were hand-timing the SRT-10 during the serious laps. How fast did it go? A low 1:46, easy, in traffic. What’s the potential for the car? Well, that’s the best part. For most modern supercars, the limit is measured in terms of the traction control, the clutch engagement speed, the power-shifting capability of the differentials. You drive to the limit of the computers and the engineers, and that’s the limit.
The R8 shows us a better way – it has traction control, and it has four-wheel-drive, but it also has a perfect chassis layout, a sweet balance, and a high-revving engine which rewards every extra tenth of a second you can squeeze out before the corner entry. It’s not a computer car. It’s not made for the feckless masses. It’s a serious driver’s sweetheart that just happens to be wrapped in a stunning body and sumptuous interior. You’re faster in the R8 with the safety net dialed back, which is as it should be.
In the Viper, there’s no safety net, no limits. We’ll never know what the Viper is truly capable of, because it would take a perfect driver to get that time. The Viper gives you as much as you put into it. All the talent, all the effort, all the courage you possess – the Viper takes it and delivers results beyond your expectations, but it never tricks you into thinking you’ve seen all it has to offer. You could drive the Viper around MSR for every one of those thirty weekends a year, for the rest of your life, and you would never find the very last hundredth of a second. Other supercars represent accomplishment, in the fiscal, engineering, or marketing sense. The Viper represents challenge. You might get tired of being stared at every time you fill up, you might grow weary of hearing people talking about your mid-life crisis, you might even come to dislike the smell of hot fiberglass which greets you at the end of every session – but you will never, ever, grow weary of driving this car as it was meant to be driven. And for that reason, it wins the on-track portion of this shootout.
Stay with us this week, as we’ll bring you Parts Two and Three of the Supercar Saturday. In Part Two, we’ll take the R8 and Viper to the freeway, the streets, and a highly dodgy-looking “storage garage” in downtown Houston. In Part Three, we’ll show you the videos we took of the on-track action and try to figure out which car we’d buy with our money. It’s not an easy choice, and we think you’ll be surprised at the results. See you soon!
