2017 Dodge Viper ACR

I suppose it’s a sign you have a good job when people ask how you got it. For a lot of us, the answer is pure dumb luck, just being in the right place at the right time.

But I didn’t need luck, because I had Ginny Kowalski. I grew up just a half-hour from Car and Driver headquarters. I’d always read and loved this magazine, but it never occurred to me that writing here was a real job that real people had. And then, during my senior year of high school, Mrs. Kowalski, a counselor with my school’s technical-education department, got me an internship here.

At the time, C/D did not regularly take interns. Nobody could remember the last one they’d had. Years later, the staffers who had supervised the internship told me that they agreed to take me on mostly so that Mrs. Kowalski would stop calling and leave them alone.

They stuck me in the office library with the task to create a searchable database of the books the magazine has been accumulating since it was founded as Sports Cars Illustrated in 1955. A room full of books about cars in the office of my favorite car magazine? I was in heaven. I was supposed to flip through each book to determine how it might be useful as reference material, punch a few relevant keywords into a spreadsheet, and move on. I ended up doing a lot of, well, reading. On my very first day, I was lost in a book when someone I hadn’t met yet knocked on the door. It was the cleaning guy. He was done for the day and everyone else had gone home, so he wondered if I knew how to lock up. I hadn’t realized it was dark outside. At the end of my first week, I met with Mrs. Kowalski to discuss the internship. I was predictably stoked. “Well,” she said, “if you ever become a writer for them, I want a ride in a Viper.”

I’ve driven a handful of Vipers since then. There was the copper 2008 coupe that I drove to an alumni day at my alma mater, spinning donuts in the parking lot immediately upon arrival to prove to my classmates that (a) I’d made it, and (b) I was still the same idiot they probably didn’t remember. There was the lime-green 2008 roadster from which, as I was leaving a parking lot in downtown Ann Arbor, I heard the Chevy Silverado driver behind me yell, “Well, that’s an expensive-looking piece of shit!” More tire smoke might have followed. There was the red 2014 I drove to a Ford Model T driving lesson—during which there was most certainly not tire smoke—thereby driving in a single afternoon one of the best-selling vehicles in history and one of the worst, although it’s unlikely I will ever again get out of one car and into another with 32 times as much power.

But by the time I was allowed near the Vipers, Mrs. Kowalski had moved on to a new school district. And because we don’t regularly have Vipers, and many cars are at our office for just a few days, the pattern would repeat every time: One would show up, and by the time I’d tracked down Mrs. Kowalski, the car would be gone. A while back, with the Viper’s demise on the horizon, I finally managed to get her into one. And not just any Viper—a $154,885 ACR Extreme. With a rear wing that generates nearly a ton of downforce at the car’s top speed, it isn’t so much a race car for the street as it is a Viking longship for pillaging racetracks—and with something approximating a longship’s considerations given to occupant comfort.

First, Mrs. Kowalski and I tour C/D HQ. Like all the best educators, she takes an almost parental pride in her students—even those she hasn’t seen in more than a decade. She peppers me with questions about my job, the education that got me here, and life outside of work in a way that reminds me how impossibly fortunate I am to do what I do. She asks what the worst things about my job are and says they’re often more telling than the best. She asks if we ever run pictures of the writers in the cars and laughs out loud when I point out the shot of me behind the wheel of a Ferrari 812 Superfast that we ran in our September 2017 issue. She stands in awe before the car board, the weekly calendar we use to keep track of who’s driving what and when.

And then it’s time to fulfill the promise. Even the simple act of turning on a Viper is like nothing else. There’s an agricultural rasp from the starter and then a grumpy hiccup as if a few cylinders are firing and a few missing before they all get behind the cause and the V-10 settles into idle. Mrs. Kowalski notices the radar detector stuck to the windshield and asks if I ever get pulled over. It reminds me of the time I took my mom—a resolute June Cleaver type who was into her fifties when she got her first traffic ticket—out for a joyride in a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and she asked with grave concern, “Are we going to speed?” Yeah, Mom, we’re going to speed.

Mrs. Kowalski and I pull onto the street, and I toe maybe halfway into the throttle. We surge past traffic and, with the windows down, the blat from the side exhausts is enough to scramble your vision. She squeals, “Ooh, that’s plenty!” and laughs. Maybe we aren’t going to speed. “Do you remember,” she asks, “that time Frank took you testing with him?” Of course I remember. It was just a month or so into my internship, the first time I ever went to Chrysler’s Chelsea Proving Grounds, where we do all of our local testing. Our technical director at the time, Frank Markus, let me ride along for the top-speed test. (Part of the reason Car and Driver hadn’t had an intern in so long was that our publisher at the time discouraged it because of liability concerns.) When Mrs. Kowalski asked if anything interesting had happened that week at my internship, I told her I’d gone 131 mph in a Mercedes-Benz S600. It turns out that our publisher wasn’t the only one with liability concerns.

But even at freeway speeds Mrs. Kowalski is thrilled to be in a Viper, tucked down low, peering over that long hood that bulges like a flexed triceps, jostling over every bump and divot in the road, feeling the heat from the engine and transmission cooking our feet, and with the exhaust drone pressurizing the cabin. That’s the thing about Dodge’s supercar, though: It’s a singular experience regardless of the speed. A Viper is special whether you’re ripping off 11-second quarter-miles or one of the fastest lap times we’ve ever recorded at Virginia International Raceway or just trundling along I-94.

Maybe that’s why the Viper is dying, because for all of its outrageousness and capability, sometimes you’re not looking for a singular experience. Sometimes, you just want to get where you’re going. But if you want to reflect on where you are with the person who set you up to get there, and make good on a promise you didn’t realize you could have meant 17 years ago, it turns out that’s one more thing the Viper excels at. Thank you, Mrs. Kowalski.

Specifications >

VEHICLE TYPE: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, 2-passenger, 2-door hatchback

PRICE AS TESTED: $154,885 (base price: $119,990)

ENGINE TYPE: pushrod 20-valve V-10, aluminum block and heads, port fuel injection

Displacement: 512 cu in, 8382 cc
Power: 645 hp @ 6200 rpm
Torque: 600 lb-ft @ 5000 rpm

TRANSMISSION: 6-speed manual

DIMENSIONS:
Wheelbase: 98.8 in
Length: 175.7 in
Width: 76.4 in Height: 49.1 in
Passenger volume: 48 cu ft
Cargo volume: 15 cu ft
Curb weight: 3400 lb

C/D TEST RESULTS:
Zero to 60 mph: 3.3 sec
Zero to 100 mph: 7.5 sec
Zero to 130 mph: 12.3 sec
Zero to 150 mph: 20.1 sec
Rolling start, 5–60 mph: 4.4 sec
Top gear, 30–50 mph: 11.0 sec
Top gear, 50–70 mph: 9.6 sec
Standing ¼-mile: 11.5 sec @ 126 mph
Top speed (drag limited, mfr's est): 177 mph
Braking, 70–0 mph: 134 ft
Roadholding, 300-ft-dia skidpad: 1.15 g

EPA FUEL ECONOMY:
Combined/city/highway: 14/12/19 mpg