[twistingasphalt.com] - What’s Next: The Last Dodge Viper

[Ninjette Newsbot]

It’s been awhile since I last wrote up a post here on the ‘ol blog and as usual it’s not for a lack of desire but rather a lack of time and energy…

Sometimes otherwise known as having no good neuron firing solution upstairs…

But the synapses are funny things and as crazy as life has been over the last two or three years, somehow it’s become even nuttier in the interim… (more on that later)… And I find it truly amazing that no matter how fast you think you’re capable of running, you always can seem to run faster and yet still faster…

To what end I am not sure, though I suspect at some point soon I shall find out…

Speed however is an even funnier thing — There’s fast… And then there’s fast…

For the past 18 years the Dodge Viper has been one of the fast, fast cars…

A couple of weeks ago I had the distinct privilege of watching, and filming, one of the last great American Muscle cars roll off the line for the final time…

I’m sure some will quibble with the assertion that the Viper is the last great American Muscle Car — and that’s ok, everyone has the right to their own opinion — but in my mind all the other classic muscle car badges have somehow evolved into something else these days… The Viper has and always will be very different…

As they say, ‘it is what it is’… A raw, unadulterated, 600+ horsepower beast of a Supercar… And it never wavered from that from day until now… There’s no Traction Control, no computerized noth’in… Just full power all the time… The Viper was neither a production car in the truest sense nor was it quite a hand-built ride exotic either, yet somehow it existed in-between those two realms for a very long time. Admittedly that’s a very hard place for a car to stand and it’s not the most friendly business model, however somehow Dodge made it work and I think you have give them incredible props for that…

One of the things that I find most fascinating about the Viper is that it takes just one look at it to know it is a special ride. Somehow that doesn’t happen exactly the same way with Vettes or Mustangs or Camaros… They’re cool but they blend in… They’ve become part of our daily automotive lexicon… The Viper never was — it was rare from day one and stayed that way…

At this point I’ve now had the good fortune of shooting in a hell of a lot of car and motorcycle factories — well over thirty at this point — and I’ve got to say that the folks who build the Viper are unlike any I’ve ever come across. There was a palpable sense of passion in the Viper factory the likes of which I’ve never quite witnessed before in person. A lot of factories say that they have that kind of passion, or more accurately the ’suits’ who sit upstairs say they do, but a lot of times the folks on the actual line are just doing their job and it wouldn’t really matter whether it was building that particular machine or a coffee grinder. That was not the case at the Viper Factory. It instantly felt different. The people there were some of the most caring, artisan, passion-filled wrenchers I’ve ever had the pleasure to get to know and frankly it showed — all day long.

The Viper is not only a hell of a supercar and beauty to look at but it’s crafted by a select group of individuals in a way that somehow articulates not only the incredible engineering that went into making the machine work superbly at speed but also echos each individual mechanics’ personal pride in what they do.

If I had the money, I’d buy a Viper tomorrow, hands down… And there’s a whole host of supercars that show up in the auto mags every month that I’d by-pass in a heartbeat and without even thinking about it… I don’t know that there’s a stronger statement about how moto-romantic I found the Viper factory…

More picts after the jump…















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