Violent Outburst: Dean Kearney’s Drift Viper Going Balls-Out At Hoonigan!


Violent Outburst: Dean Kearney’s Drift Viper Going Balls-Out At Hoonigan!

For the most part, I’m a team player. I follow traffic laws. I open doors for others. I try to be as neutral as possible…partly because I’m fully aware that I can be intimidating to others and partly because most days, I don’t want to hear someone else’s crap, so if I’m polite but forgettable, I can be on my way in short order with no problems at all. It’s worked for me for decades at this point, so I must have the formula down pat. But here’s the thing: “most days” does not mean “everyday”. There are days where I am going to have your attention, one way or another. There are days where I wake up with a chip on my shoulder the size of a Texan’s belt buckle. These are the days where I would slap my momma for a candy bar, where I’d happily hop on a dirt bike and try to fly again, where each traffic light invokes the need to let traffic hear the exhaust sing, where Interstate on-ramps become playgrounds. When I get into that mood, I want what, in my mind, I refer to as “the mule”.

It’s the black Ford beater concept, an idea whose root form came from a 1973 Mercury Comet I learned how to drive like an asshole in. Spins, J-turns, Rockfords, bootlegger 180s. It was a car that was not only okay to abuse, but it was a car that didn’t seem to mind it a bit. It didn’t get hot. It didn’t bitch. It just happily revved to the moon while the rear quarters took on a kind of fuzzy appearance, with all of that rubber sticking on. It was tossable, potent, geared low and to date the pinnacle of what a fun beater should be.

This is not a beater. This is a drift-spec Dodge Viper driven by Dean Kearney that has an unholy amount of power on tap before the nitrous system gets turned on. The headlights alone in this car might cost as much as the Comet did back in the later 1990s. But the idea is still the same: the car exists for one reason and one reason only: to hell with the rear tires, quite literally. The only thing that old Mercury of my memory has over this Viper? License plates. That’s it. It’s not a car you treat nicely. You don’t bother with the word “gentle”. Clutch-kick that mother, get the tires loose and pin the throttle like you damn well mean it.

Don’t bother saying that it’s wasteful and stupid, either. This isn’t a sport, this is therapy…like bashing glass out with a baseball bat. You will feel better afterwards, I promise you. Fifth gear tire fire? Why?

Because I can, that’s why.


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