Power of Ten: The V-10 Viper carved its own path

Jack Baruth
12 October 2021
Share Matthew Tierney“My Plymouth Fury is parked directly across the road. Where do you live?”

“In the hearts of men,” Sullivan said.

This last line, spoken by a gorgeous and enigmatic artist in Don DeLillo’s Americana, always makes me think of certain automobiles—none more so than the Dodge/SRT Viper. It, too, lives in the hearts of men, and as a consequence of this, and also of its self-proclaimed status as authentic successor to the original AC Cobra, the Viper has been shrouded by a certain mystery since its conception.

We are told—and we tell each other—that Vipers are: dangerous in all sorts of weather, too powerful for any but the truly experienced to handle, prone to terrifying and truck-like behavior on a racetrack, and capable of killing their owners given a mere heartbeat’s worth of inattention.
Matthew Tierney It does not help matters much that the car’s namesake, the saw-scaled viper, Echis carinatus, is the world’s deadliest snake, responsible for more human deaths than all other snakes combined. You can’t blame people for reading the label on the tin and taking it seriously. Bob Lutz didn’t suggest they name Chrysler’s V-10 paleo-roadster Mr. Snuggles The Fluffy Bunny, you know.

Maybe he should have, because the mystique surrounding the Viper probably sent a lot of less-than-confident buyers straight to a Chevrolet dealership for what they thought would be a safer and saner experience behind the crossed-flags badge of a Corvette. This was a ridiculous delusion on their part, particularly during a certain time period to be discussed below. Almost all of the deadliest-snake hype surrounding the Viper dissipates the minute you drive any car bearing the badge around a road course. Even the most wicked Viper is a friendly and capable racetrack companion. If you can wheel a Miata competently, you can probably do the same with a Viper—and vice versa, as the two cars share a lot of dynamic qualities. Forget the hype; allow the legend to dwindle in your mind for a moment.
Andrew TrahanIn pursuance of demonstrating this assertion, we asked three Viper owners to meet us at GingerMan Raceway in western Michigan. Mike Cipponeri brought a fine 1994 RT/10 roadster in that shade of blood red familiar from a thousand childhood posters, Steve Urbanec supplied his recently acquired 2003 SRT-10 droptop, and Marty Heitkamp arrived in a fabulous 2016 ACR powered by a 9.0-liter Prefix V-10. All three of these gentlemen are former Chrysler engineers, and they are true Viper believers. They encouraged me to drive without hesitation or concern, and although I stopped short of treating their cars in an abusive or careless fashion, I was able to run them hard enough to obtain quite a number of useful impressions, both individually and as a group.

Conditions at GingerMan were cool and clear for our drive, the track having been washed clean of rubber by a long night’s worth of rain. I decided to start the same way Bob Lutz started: with the simplest Viper built. Cipponeri has owned this 1994 RT/10 since 1997. A member of “Team Viper” from 1989 to 1996, he was assigned to the electrical system. “We knew we could cut costs by using existing parts, and we looked everywhere: Corvette, Ford, even Lotus.” The original front side markers were sourced from a trailer-parts supplier. “When I called them, they said, ‘You know this light is for a trailer, right?’ We changed the optic lens and it was ready to go. I think it looks right, still.”
Low-slung and sleek, the RT/10 roadster presented our towering author with a choice: look through the windshield or above it. Cameron NeveuThat it does; in fact, the whole car just looks right, one of those designs that seemed to fall right off the auto-show stand into everyday traffic without so much as a once-over in between. Cipponeri has upgraded the leather and a few of the accessories in the interior, but it’s still a bare-bones affair, the gauges in the panel and the dull sheen of the dashboard plastic instantly recognizable from the contemporary Neon and Intrepid sedans. A sticker in the doorjamb warns of HOT EXHAUST PIPES directly below your feet.

A twist of the fragile-feeling manual-key-release ignition cylinder, also familiar from Neons, and the 400-hp, 8.0-liter V-10 comes to life, settling into an unworried idle that immediately marks it as being infinitely more modern than the Cobras it was supposed to succeed. There’s plenty of room in the cockpit—by Miata standards, at least—and the shifter has long, light throws. You wouldn’t want to do a lot of parallel parking with this car, as the corners can be hard to see. Nor would you want to roll it over; my Impact racing helmet is a full 6 inches clear of the roll bar and windshield frame.

There’s no chance of testing my helmet’s rollover resistance, of course; not in this sweetheart of a roadster. I don’t expect it to be fast, because it isn’t, at least not by modern standards. Contemporaneous testers struggled to get the early Vipers down to the 13-second mark through a quarter-mile; today, a dealer will happily sell you a 5300-pound Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk that can more or less count one Mississippi, two Mississippi before running the big snake down at the 1320 line.