Well the mighty Dodge Viper has reached the end of its production life. That’s a sad thing because over the course of its 24 year life the thing has personified bad ass in multiple different ways. When it first came out, the public had the reaction that it is currently having with the Demon which is a range of admiration and complete disbelief. Remember that 1993 car? People were flummoxed as to why anyone would buy a car for that amount of money that didn’t even have fixed windows. The V10 engine was enormous and it sounded weird and the Viper was a car that 13 year old me was obsessed with reading about in the buff books every month.
The Viper became a successful race car on the international sports car scene and it traded body blows with the factory teams from all around the world, all the while it was its hulking, brutish self. Then the GTS model hit the streets and the car became instantly sexy again with the roof bulges as to accommodate the helmets of the driver and passenger on the track. Then there were the specialty editions, the ACR, and others that kept the noise and excitement level up.
But all things have a life span and the Viper is seeing the end of the one it has had for two decades. It’ll leave with its chin up and head held high. This was a car that never got screwed up, watered down, or bean-countered to death. It did things its own way for the duration of its life. That’s the mark of a bad ass.
And then there’s this. Pennzoil, which has really gotten its act together in terms of appealing to the high performance enthusiast over the last couple of years has released a short film called “The Last Viper” and it is the kind of thing that’ll bring a tear to your eye because there’s no dialog outside of a couple of texts but there is 10 lifetimes of eardrum massage screaming at you for the entire video because the Viper you see above gets beaten mercilessly. It gets hammered frontwards and backwards, with the tires smoking virtually the whole time.
We love the story, we love the fact that someone at Pennzoil had the guts to sit in a board meeting and propose this, and we love the fact that the car is truly the star of this one. Dodge themselves could not have done a better job.
Oh and the teaser at the end will really make you grin.
How is it the Viper escaped the driven by douche bags reputation suffered by the Corvettes and especially the Mustangs?
because if you don’t know how to drive a viper you end up dead or it ends up totaled and you’re in jail. So they either drive them like there’s a babies head under the accelerator or they actually can drive one.