When Brian Lohnes, a man who tends to keep his comparisons realistic, willfully correlated his time in a Dodge Challenger Hellcat to the perfect drug, that should have said it all. When every car rag and blog out there went ballistic for that engine, that solidified our stance. The Hellcat Hemi is unquestionably the modern engine that lives up to the hype of it’s namesake, the one that keeps the image of a Chrysler Hemi as a powerplant that requires your A-game as a driver, the one that can only just barely be tamed enough to drive.
With that in mind, putting a Hellcat on ice sounds like the worst plan in the world, doesn’t it? You’d expect one of two things to happen when you plant your foot: either the car will go nowhere until the rear tires burn through the layer of ice to a much more suitable surface, or you will become a passenger on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride as the car does any and everything except drive forward in a straight line. But if you know what you are doing behind the wheel, and have studded tires to give the Hellcat some actual claws, then what you are about to see here is possible: during Årsunda Speed Weekend in Sweden, driver Alx Danielsson managed to run the car up to 170 miles an hour, clocking an average speed of 162 miles an hour. Watch as he saws the wheel during the run…even with the studded tires, this was a wild ride!
What kind of tire can withstand 5 lbs of nuts and bolts screwed onto the tread and still have it not disintegrate at 175 MPH?