Big, boorish and slithery-swift in a straight line, the V10-engined Dodge Viper was born out of Chrysler president Bob Lutz and chief designer Tom Gale’s desire to build a modern version of the Shelby Cobra.
Funny sort of car company, Chrysler. Amid a sea of plain sedans and grey minivans, every now and then it unleashes some pure, Mopar magic. The original Hemi V8s and slant-sixes. The sky-scraping Dodge Charger Daytona. The Aussie Charger E49. The Plymouth Prowler. And the Dodge Viper RT/10.
Launched in 1992, the Viper RT/10 was dripping with cool, 1960s American sports-racer cues. But the history it recalled was one Chrysler never had.
The Viper was born from an early-1988 chat between then Chrysler president Bob Lutz and chief designer Tom Gale, to build a modern version of the Shelby Cobra.
It probably helped that Lutz drove a 1985 Autocraft Cobra MkIV replica almost daily, Gale was a lifelong hot-rodder, and Carroll Shelby himself was at the time on Chrysler’s payroll, hot-shopping various Dodge production cars.
Another key ingredient was former Gordini and Renault engineer, Francois Castaing. He’d been with Chrysler since 1980, and had recently finished a hulking, 8.0-litre V10 engine for Dodge’s muscular Ram pick-up trucks.
Popular belief has the Viper’s 8.0-litre V10 engine lifted straight out of said truck. The LA-series design is shared, but the Viper’s block and heads are in aluminium (versus cast iron), saving some 75kg. Lamborghini, then owned by Chrysler, did all the castings.
The project took shape quickly, with a running V10 prototype making its debut just 11 months later, at the Detroit show in January 1989. In May, Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca greenlit the 8.0-litre roadster for limited production.
Lutz’s team didn’t have an alloy V10 ready for their ’89 show car; they made a running example from a grafted V8.
First-generation Viper V10s made 298kW at a snoozy 4600rpm and a stump-jumping 630Nm, and drove through a snatchy, six-speed Tremec manual tranny. Zero to 100km/h was done in 4.4 seconds.
Lutz’s conviction that was that the Viper should retain the hairy-chested appeal of the original Cobra – meaning, it would eschew all-wheel drive, four-wheel steer, turbocharging and even decent weatherproofing.
The 1542kg Viper roadster rode on a hefty space-frame chassis of mainly rectangular tubing, with a subframe attached at the rear bulkhead. Chrysler praised its stiffness, although the roadster felt more like a sagging four-poster bed.
Suspension was by double wishbones front and rear, with power-assist rack and pinion steering, but handling was mostly about grip from the 275/35ZR18 front and 335/30ZR18 rear rubber.
One area in which the roadster was advanced was in the use of RIM (resin-injected moulding), a plastic compound, for the Viper’s body panels. Indeed, the Viper’s bonnet panel was the largest single RIM moulding ever used in the industry.
The enormous bonnet was also a production nightmare, the manufacturer having to bin one in three due to not meeting quality standards.
The Viper really got on the map when a hastily built prototype paced the 1991 Indy 500, with a freshly re-engined Carroll Shelby at the wheel. (Editor’s note: Shelby underwent a heart transplant in 1990 and in 1991, the same year he was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he founded the Shelby Heart Fund.)
When deliveries began in early-1992, it was mob-scene stuff. Only 285 cars were built that year, and those first buyers were willing to pay as much as three times the US$55,000 list price.
For such a big car – 4.5m from bumper to bumper, and 1.9m wide – the Viper’s interior was plain claustrophobic. The tall-sided, broad-tunnelled cockpit offered barely more room than an MX-5, and rear vision was blocked by the roll bar (labelled: “this is not a roll bar.”)
It wasn’t Ferrari stuff inside – acres of brittle-looking plastic, Sasquatch-spec controls and kit-car quality – and it wasn’t the sharpest-handling tool either. Nor, disappointingly, did it sound at all special. But it was made in Ferrari numbers, with annual production having never exceeded the 3083 units of 1994.
Indeed, just 17,949 of the first-gen roadsters and coupes were produced from 1992-2003.
The Viper was big, boorish and slithery-swift in a straight line. Which meant that Bob Lutz and Tom Gale had got their “modern Cobra” just right.
