It’s incredible to consider that we live in an age where automakers are regularly cranking out 500, 600, and in the case of the Dodge Challenger Hellcat, 707 horsepower sports cars straight from the factory floor. It’s an ungodly amount of power, more than most people will ever be able to use on the street, and even at the drag strip.
About the only place you can really flex all 707 ponies in the Challenger Hellcat is a long, flat straightaway, and given the chance this Fiat-Chrysler monster will speed all the way to 199 MPH. In the above video, the Hellcat “only” reaches 189 MPH, but it does so in the company of elite European exotics.
Compared to the Ferraris and Bimmers that typically occupy most of the space at European top speed events, the Challenger Hellcat might as well be a battleship due to both its size and weight. We have no way of knowing this for sure, but we’d be willing to bet that it was easily the biggest competition car there, and probably by a wide margin. At 198 inches/16.5 feet and a gluttonous 4,449 pound curb weight, it’s a literal heavyweight by comparison.
Yet that doesn’t prevent the Hellcat from keeping up with much lighter vehicles in those long, straight lines, like the BMW M4 and some kind of European uber-exotic that we can’t quite identify (Ferrari?). Perhaps the most surprising thing about this video isn’t how easily the Hellcat keeps up with competition from across the pond, but just how quiet the cabin is, even at speeds approaching 200 MPH. American cars have become a lot more refined in the past decade, even our monster sports cars apparently.
Power. Speed. Refinement. The Challenger Hellcat has it all.