Yahoo Autos The Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat Is the Best Hellcat Yet
The Challenger and Charger Hellcats have never been sports cars. That wasn’t even the idea. Too old, too heavy, too plush to ever be considered in the category. Which then raises the question: Why bother constraining this Homeric engine to living entirely within sporty shapes? That line of thought led to the Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk, FCA’s best invention until the dawn of this, the 2021 Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat.
The fundamental limitations holding back the Charger and Challenger are also endemic to SUVs. You can, obviously, accuse the Durango of being overweight and less engaging than a proper sports car, but that’s true of the X5 M, GLE 63, and everything else on the ladder up to and including the Lamborghini Urus. Ford will happily sell you a muscle car that makes over 700 hp, holds up to repeated lapping, and provides sports-car tactility. No such competition exists for the Durango, certainly not at its $82,490 starting price.
Among its super-SUV compatriots, it fares well. That 710-hp engine is the defining feature of any Hellcat product, but there’s a surprising core competency in this chassis. Which could be a result of low expectations; after all, no one expects a 5710-lb Bronze Age SUV to feel nimble. Yet the Durango manages its own inertia well, steering with precision and turning in eagerly. No doubt you’ll lose ground to the sprightly X5 M through hairpins, but its composure is nonetheless impressive. Restraint must be exercised to prevent all four wheels from erupting in smoke. Ease onto the gas and you’ll find this Durango as predictable as it has to be, the thought of a truly untamed 710-hp SUV too harrowing to ever be palatable.
This comes into clearer focus when you try to stop the Durango. Gargantuan 15.7-inch front brakes with six-piston Brembo calipers put up a good fight, but as any armchair physicist will tell you, trying to stop a 6000-lb SUV on all-season tires on 32-degree roads isn’t going to instill confidence. Objective dry-weather braking tests put the Durango in line with other mega-powered SUVs, but in practice there’s a primal recognition that it’s remarkably easy to end up in over your head with a vehicle that mixes so much horsepower with this much weight.
God, though, the power. Forget the numbers. Focus on the bellow, the bass drum bravado, the overtones of artillery-shell whine. Ejected ten feet behind you, staggering quantities of exhaust gasses bombard the air with such conviction in their own authority that the whole phenomenon actually starts to feel permissible. It’s hard to imagine the Lord would give us this kind of hellfire if He didn’t want to see us try to wrangle it. And try the Durango does, deploying all-wheel-drive and a remarkably tuned version of ZF’s omnipresent eight-speed automatic in the service of turning rage into some sort of forward motion. Sixty arrives in 3.5 seconds, 100 in frankly not enough time after that. Your eyes set dead ahead, knuckles whitening, mind utterly disabused of the idea that all-wheel-drive provides enough grip for you to thumb the traction control off button. Give it six, eight, twelve drive wheels and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference: No amount of all-season rubber can convert 640 lb-ft of torque into unhindered acceleration.
Even with the assists fully enabled, a half-second with your foot on the floor can lead to spiritual awakenings and introspective crises. Disable them and you’ll find that the Durango Hellcat is not merely capable of four-wheel drifts; it is entirely disinterested in anything else. Best to leave the electronics on for canyon carving, where the explosive power and excellent body control provide exciting less-than-lethal entertainment. Which is, after all, the point. Many SUVs provide obnoxious power outputs and staggering performance metrics; few cause anything resembling visceral excitement. The Durango does, not through tactile feedback and poise, but through sheer force of will. You’ll grin not out of whimsy, but shaky-legged awe.
