Driving the 707 hp Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat, the world's fastest muscle car

You’ve likely heard the statistics: The 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat boasts 707 hp and completes the quarter-mile in 11.2 seconds, making it not only the most powerful muscle car ever, but also the fastest. This derives from a new 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI V-8; why not turbocharged, you ask? As Tim Kuniskis, Dodge and SRT Brand CEO puts it: “Because the blower sounds badass.”

That it does. It’s almost animalistic, angry and yet intensely evocative. It’s quite possibly the best sounding car outside of a Ferrari 458.

The speed? Ballistic, and I mean properly fast. Maybe it’s not McLaren 650S fast, or even Porsche 911 Turbo fast, but it’s far more involving. Rowing through the 6-speed manual gearbox lifted and gently massaged from the Viper, you’re constantly on edge, constantly managing something: the tire slip, subtle steering corrections, the rear tires dancing from side to side like Travolta, only drunk.

Unless you’re in the most restrictive of the three modes (Street rather than Sport and Track), burnouts are accomplished merely by grazing your right foot against the throttle pedal; you don’t even need to switch off the traction control. It’s pure, unadulterated madness.

Accelerating to 60 mph in well below four seconds, the new Hellcat will amaze, but we knew that already, didn’t we? The numbers promise such theatrics.

The bit we’re all wondering is what happens when a corner arrives?

If you ask Chevy, becoming the greatest muscle car of them all is determined by how fast one can lap a racetrack. You’ll learn how a Camaro ZL1 is faster than a Mustang GT500, and how a 1LE outpaces a Boss 302 Laguna Seca. Then, of course, you’ll see that a new Camaro Z/28 crushes the lot of them, while matching the lap times of a track-focused Nissan GT-R.

So does that mean a Camaro is better than a Mustang? Or does the GT500’s 662 ponies, superior punch down the strip, and 200 mph top speed ensure its place on top? The answer is highly subjective with no right or wrong answer. What’s clear, however, is that in recent years, the Challenger has not featured in this battle. It’s been a two horse race.

For Dodge, it’s still not about the lap times. It’s about staying true to the 1960s and early ‘70s, an era where muscle cars ruled supreme and men with glorious mustaches permed their hair.

I like Dodge’s approach: No frills, no BS. The Challenger doesn’t pretend to be a sports car in muscular clothes and flared jeans. It’s a brute, a muscle car, just a muscle car, and it’s damn proud of it: “You can’t do both,” Tim Kuniskis told me at our first drive event in Portland, Ore.

A key change to this latest Challenger, besides the Hellcat’s beastly powerplant, is an optional new 8-speed automatic transmission. The shorter first few gear ratios allow for a 0.5 second drop in 0-60 mph times, and on a racetrack, it’s highly intuitive when selecting the correct cog for a specific corner. In fact, for the first time in my life, I was happy leaving the transmission in auto rather than clicking the paddles. This new tranny leads to improved fuel efficiency in all models, too.