Purple Haze: See Zach Friedman’s Screamin’ 2017 Dodge ACR Viper

You find yourself rumbling down the cobblestone streets and through some of the most beautiful antebellum Southern architecture in coastal Georgia. The streets are lined with oak trees, dripping with Spanish moss. The city of Savannah has a lot to offer from its laid-back nightlife and fantastic restaurants to its visual sensory overload of pre-civil war homes and buildings.

For Zach Friedman, a 33-year-old, a general contractor and the owner of a heating and air conditioning company, Savannah is home. His vision of owning a Viper came true a few years back when he purchased his first red Dodge Viper. It drove well and sounded great, but it didn’t have the head-turning attraction that Zach wanted. When he saw a custom, one-of-one purple Viper advertised for sale in the Carolina’s in June of 2017, he couldn’t pass it up.

“I called up the dealer, drove up to North Carolina, took one look and made the decision right there to buy the car on site. I do love the car,” Zach said of his 2017 Dodge ACR Viper.

Shortly after he purchased the car, Zach began performing upgrades. “The ceramic TPM was the first thing replaced. Like all Vipers, it had to have a ping correction, so I threw a tune on the car right away,” Zach said.

Next, Zach had the calipers powder coated to match the car along with the engine covers. Shortly after, he decided the car needed more power and pulled the engine to add 9-liter stroker heads and cams. He was determined not to throw off the weight balance of the car, so he decided to keep the car naturally aspirated and to forgo the twin turbo option at the time.

“Why take the world’s best manual track car and screw it up?” Zach said. “I thought that it would be better to do a little research and make things better. I got with Calvo Motorsports and put my plan into action.” The cylinder block, heads, and cams were sent to Texas, and while working together, Zach was able to spec out the build with the help of Calvo Motorsports.

Fast Forward Racing assembled the naturally aspirated, V10 Viper engine with all of the specified parts that were provided by Calvo. After receiving the car back, Zach was going to run the car on an HP tune. Initially, he had the car tuned by Ken B of Palm Beach Dyno. Ken set the world record for naturally aspirated horsepower on 93 octane shortly after that. The car makes 786 horsepower on 93 octane before the bottle, and on the spray, the heat can be turned up to 1,100 horsepower.

The first significant upgrade took the Viper out of commission for eight months. The exhaust system was all hand fabricated by Origin Fabrication in Atlanta, Georgia. “He takes his time,” Zach said in a casual voice of the fabricator who made the headers, noting it took three months. Some of the fabrication was completed in California, but the challenge for Zach was waiting for everything to be shipped from different locations and then arrive intact.

The cylinder heads were a combined effort from Calvo Motorsports and HeadGames. They used all Calvo parts while HeadGames performed all of the porting and machining magic. So with all of this magic coming out of the woodwork, he was anxious to get it assembled.

Once everything was received, the assembly could begin. “It took about three months for all of the engine stuff to show up because then, they didn’t have too many parts on the shelf just yet,”Zach said. With assembly complete and after a brief test drive, Zach decided to add a Motec system.

Zach, unable to leave anything alone, was motivated to make the car better, not necessarily more efficient but he strives to find the maximum performance limits of naturally aspirated engines. “I don’t know, it’s probably something wrong with me? I just wanted it to be a little more my car and personalize it instead of it being the factory’s car” Zach said.

“It’s probably, hands down, the best handling car that I have ever driven. And as the power increases, it’s just a crazed animal,” explained Zach. The tradeoff seems to be that generating power comes noise, and a lot of it. The abundance of the road noise inside of the cockpit makes it very hard to drown out the high decibels while driving slow on the highway, even with a huge, custom stereo system in place. He says that “It’s got this nasty, high-end sound that just screams and it idles like a pissed off drag car, pretty much.”

Zach had fallen in love with the Viper years before, “I’ve liked a lot of different cars, but those are the cars that everybody likes. Everybody likes the McLaren’s, the Ferrari’s. I remember the first time that I ever saw a Viper. I was six years old. It was just cool, everything about it was cool. I remember that it was blue. After that, they just seemed to catch my attention.”

The fifth generation Viper’s had an exceptional design with elegance that put it in a class of its own. The car has a raw edge with the most exquisite precision.

Zach is very satisfied with his choice and the car. “It’s a lot of freakin’ fun. It’s so very subtle, you know?” as he chuckles sarcastically. “I didn’t buy it to sit in a box somewhere and collect dust. I mean, it’s just a shame to not drive a car like that. Only to park it somewhere and put plastic over it. Let it die inside.” said Zach.

With that said, their are drawbacks. Zach explained some time ago the back glass had violently shattered and it took five months to obtain replacement glass from the manufacturer due to it being a limited production vehicle.

Currently, the car is in a shop in Austin, Texas and Zach is looking into adding a sequential transmission upgrade and changing the transmission gear ratios in the car, though a decision still has not been made. Zach expects to receive the car from Texas in October, he mentioned the possibility of the car seeing some track time.

“Once you build a car, you should just live with it and be happy. Not try to reinvent the wheel, especially when the wheel already rolls fine. You are just investing more time” Zach said. He added that his previous builds included a Toyota Supra and a turbocharged Ford Mustang, but the Viper has been the most exciting.

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