The Long Goodbye: 2021 Dodge Super Stock Challenger Drag Test

The 2021 Dodge SRT Super Stock Challenger is a bucket-list car. Its 807-hp supercharged, intercooled 6.2-liter Hemi—like the 2018 Dodge Demon's 840-hp unit—was deemed so powerful none of these benchmark cars were ever put into the press fleet. In most hands, it would've been the equivalent of giving a box of shotgun shells and a hammer to a 13-year-old and not expecting anything bad to happen. Then the pandemic hit, and any thoughts of promoting these uber-muscle cars through press programs or test loaners was put on ice. We're finally testing a 2021 Super Stock in 2022. That's not a typo, and we're not complaining.

In the full gallop towards Dodge's 2024 EV engineering freeze, some gracious soul in Auburn Hills thought it would be nice to stamp-out one of these devils for the press fleet before pure internal combustion engines are stamped out by the Feds. This is that car. Love it or hate it, the reality of a world without new gasoline-powered Hemi V-8s is imminent. While the end of the ICE road seems far off (2035 or thereabouts), it will be here soon enough. With that background, the unscripted appearance of the Super Stock in the press fleet was a welcome reprieve.

Fans of Dodge's latest performance offering have spent the past couple of years figuring out if the Super Stock really exists beyond mystical appearances on the internet, and whether they could afford the payment on one. The $83K cost of entry for a base-model Super Stock (our tester topped $97K) might seem high, but considering the totality of the Super Stock's capabilities, it's a performance bargain. As the owner of an "ordinary" narrow-body 2017 Hellcat with 707 hp, I was excited to get the call, mainly because it had all the appeal of a weeklong driver's vacation. It made me seriously wonder if it was Dodge's latest attempt to get me to call my banker (again!).

Putting around in the Dodge SRT Super Stock for a few days would be fun, but this kind of bucket-list car called for something special. We contacted Radford Racing School in Phoenix, Arizona, to attend their drag racing class, which features the 2018 Dodge Demon. This would give us the full-immersion SRT treatment with the Demon, a car against which the Dodge SRT Super Stock is often compared. We'd be able to drive them both down the quarter-mile at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park in Phoenix, Arizona, the first time a head-to-head media comparison of the two would ever be made. We could unpack some of the engineering nuances of each and put an end to speculation. Best of all, the drive to Radford in Phoenix would give us long-needed seat time in the Super Stock. It would prove to be, perhaps not so surprisingly, an emotional experience.

As one who was too young to take part in the original muscle car revolution of the 1960s and early '70s, I've spent a 30-year career being a cheerleader for modern electronic fuel-injected performance, chasing Detroit's rear-drive V-8 machinery with a vengeance. A million other people like me did the same. Eventually, performance woke up in the late 1980s, got stronger in the 1990s, and eclipsed the old benchmarks in the new millennium.

Related: King for a Day in a Dodge Demon at Radford Racing School

Meanwhile, the efficiency, safety, and fuel economy of domestic performance cars soared. In 2018, domestic muscle car performance hit its peak with the 840-hp Dodge SRT Demon, but kept us in the fray until today with the similar but slightly less potent 807-hp Dodge SRT Super Stock.

Fast-forward to the present. The Super Stock thrums down the I-10 in stupendous 113-degree heat. I'm cocooned in air-conditioned comfort, watching sun-drenched hills dotted with cacti march by sluggishly at 90 mph. Hard as it is to wrap my mind around it, I'm driving a car that is as quick in the quarter-mile as Sox and Martin's 1970 Plymouth Hemi 'Cuda Pro Stock race car and doing it at 17 mpg in sybaritic comfort. It occurs to me that this could be the last time I ever get to drive a new car like this. I weigh the chances in my head that this could be the final drive, but the exercise is academic—it doesn't matter if there are five more cars in the short time remaining; they'll all be gone from dealerships before the next whiz-bang iPhone comes out. The long goodbye that I've dreaded has begun. The mission for me and my cohort now is simply to live fully in the moment.

I'd written my first magazine story in 1991—a tech piece on how to improve the exhaust system of a 225-hp 5-liter Mustang—an idea the Super Stock pretty much laughs at. Staring over the Super Stock's voluptuous twin-bulge hood I think, things have come such a long way. We've championed countless domestic hot rods in thousands of stories, from Fox-body Mustangs and Turbo Buicks to fourth-generation GM F-bodies and LX-platform Hemi cars. The brand on the fender never made a difference but going as fast as possible for the least amount of cash did, and nothing has ever beaten a Detroit muscle car—at least for folks who think like me. In past years, there was always something better and more badass just over the horizon—a GNX to the Grand National, a Turbo GTA to the Pontiac Trans Am, a Cobra to the Mustang GT, a Hellcat to the 392 Apache. With news that Ford and Chevy (but not Mopar) have dropped out of this year's SEMA show (the hot-rodder's Mecca), it forces us to ponder, in theory at least, the existential survival of hot rodding.

The Super Stock and the Demon look so similar in life and on paper that talking about their differences seems like splitting hairs, but that isn't the case. First, some production stats. The Demon was limited to 3,300 examples for just a single model year (3,000 U.S., 300 for Canada) while Super Stock production was not (and still isn't) capacity-constrained. No matter; only 192 Super Stocks were built in 2020, the first year of its production, making it the rarer of the two. Our 2021 Super Stock is just one of 559 built last year, and it looks like about the same number will be built in 2022. Pundits who follow such stats say the Super Stock's multiyear production will top out at less than the Demon's one-year production run, potentially a good thing for Super Stock owners. These are some rare cars, and despite the fact that you can still order one new, the vultures are already circling; brand-new Super Stocks are selling at auction in the six-figure range. Such are the vagaries of supply-chain issues and dealer markups.

In everyday driving, the difference between the Demon and the Super Stock is vanishingly small, but get it on track and the difference is spectacular. Without even using the Demon's launch control, trans brake, or skinny front-runner tires, we were able to click off a 9.72 at 130 mph in Radford's 2018 Demon. (Dodge states the Demon's official quarter-mile performance at 9.65/140 mph.) On the same track on the same night with the same foot-brake driving technique, the Super Stock managed a best e.t. of 10.41 at 123 mph, also with the author driving. The two factors that made the most difference: the use of 100-octane fuel for 840 hp (versus the Super Stock's 807 hp on a 91-octane tune) and the Demon's active drag suspension.

Before continuing, it's worth pointing out that the instructors at the Radford Racing School have now had four years to drive, maintain, and otherwise learn how to run the Demon down the quarter-mile. They are the de facto experts on how to get the most out of a stock Dodge SRT Demon, and they're exceptional at training even the most non-mechanical novice to extract a good performance from Dodge's arsenal. To read about what it's like to participate in Radford's Drag Racing course, check out our companion story.

What we learned at Radford and previous testing might sound contrary to SRT's official company line, but for Demons the features of the trans brake and launch control are largely ineffective; without true slicks and an ideal track (no track is ideal in 113 degrees!) these features completely overwhelm the tire/track interface. In fact, we suggest doing the opposite in hot, humid, slick conditions: crank the air conditioning, heat-soak the engine, kill some of that torque, and load the trunk with whatever extra weight you can get away with to help plant the rear tires.

Radford instructors Chuck Sundstrom and Josh Edwards wasted no time in drilling into us a simple, short list of instructions for the burnout and launch, the thrust of which was to instill a robot-like repetition. While this was relatively easy for the first-timers in the class, it was tough to break decades of bad habits formed through the trial and error of testing magazine cars. We had an ace in the hole by having Chuck and Josh to coax us, and it paid off handsomely with our top e.t. slips: 9.72/130 for the Demon and 10.41/123 for the Super Stock. Both performances came late in the evening after 11 pm when the air had cooled to around 95 degrees. Our only past experience drag racing the SRT Dodge Demon was at Irwindale, California's, eighth-mile track in June 2020, where it put down a best of 6.71/105, which is roughly a 10.58 in the quarter-mile.

Ever since Dodge introduced the Demon with an official NHRA-certified run of 9.65 at 140 mph (seen above), we've wanted to duplicate the effort. Back in June 2020 we said, "We know the Demon can do it, and when it does, we'll be there. " At Radford, we finally got the chance, but it was an uphill battle. With the Go Mango Super Stock waiting in the wings until after official class time was over, we worked the school's Redline Red Demon, trying to keep up with the other students' times. After a disastrous 12.12 followed by a string of high 10s and what we thought was an unrepeatable Hail Mary 10.20, we got an epiphany from instructor Josh Edwards in the burnout box: "If you can catch the wheelspin sooner, there's another half-second in it."

Back to that in a moment. Both the Demon and the Super Stock are loaded with dragstrip tools in the form of hardware and software. In the case of the Super Stock, it's the line-lock, launch control, power chiller, torque reserve, and race cooldown. For the Demon, add trans brake and active drag suspension to that list. Because this was an introductory course, only the line-lock and launch control were used. Moreover, due to the poor weather, our instructors abandoned the launch control early in the night when most students lit the tires like "Jungle" Jim Liberman doing a half-track burnout. In case you're wondering why we didn't use the chiller, race cooldown, or trans brake features, the track simply wasn't able to take the application of any more power on the starting line. More to the point, until it really happened, we thought a 9-second timeslip wasn't in the cards.

Instead of parking and chilling the SRT Demons in the pit area like dedicated drag racers, we students lined up on the return road, air conditioning units blazing. For a split second, I felt sorry for those trapped outside in the monsoonal humidity, and daydreamed of beer on ice. But first, some unfinished business. I pulled the heat-soaked Demon to the burnout box. Josh Edwards signaled me to roll down my window, laying on the sage advice: get your wheelspin under control ASAP. But how?

The Launch Control feature on the Hellcat, Redeye, Super Stock, and Demon models allows you to set the rev limiter at full throttle for launch: Once you're pre-staged, put your foot on the brake, bump into the stage beams, activate launch control, and plant the accelerator pedal to the floor—nothing less than full down on the gas pedal will activate the launch control. (Doing that in any other car would be disastrous, making this a serious trust issue the first time you do it.) With the footbrake applied, the engine will immediately go to the pre-set rpm.

When the 'tree comes down, take your foot off the brake and watch things get big in the windshield. The only "problem" with this is that the engine will go right to full throttle, which is not the modulated approach you need on a track with poor traction. If track conditions are sketchy, this will result in you doing a rolling burnout for the first 300 feet—exactly what caught the watchful eye of the Radford staff.

All the tire smoke notwithstanding, the intriguing thing about the many wheel-blazing launches that Launch Control produced was that, in a few cases, students went quicker down the quarter-mile. When another student poked a different Demon into the 9.90s with an ugly tire-frying launch, we took notice. It wasn't pretty, but since the wheelspin was just short of total annihilation, it resulted in a faster run. It was after this observation that Josh Edwards spoke those magic words to us in the water box: Spin is good, but not too much. Here's how the Demon's 9.72 run went down.

I was guided into the water box by Edwards, who directed me to roll through the water and just past it to the dry edge. With the "Race Options" page open on the SRT dashboard, one must hit "Activate Line Lock Control" on the screen then push the brake pedal until at least 1,100 psi of brake pressure is indicated on the driver display. Push the "OK" button on the left side of the steering wheel and the front brakes will be locked, but not the rear brakes. Release the brake pedal and begin the burnout; providing your left thumb is on the "OK" button, the front brakes will hold the car in place while you do your burnout.

Bring the engine rpm to between 3,000 and 4,000, keeping the rpm steady as the transmission shifts into second, then third gear. Engine rpm will want to drop with each gear change so you've got to add more throttle to keep the rear wheels turning. After a slow two-count in third gear, release the "OK" button and roll the car out of the burnout. (Too much burnout needlessly kills the tires and results in a slippery, oily tire.) Make sure to get off the throttle before the tires hook up, or you risk blowing the sprag out of the stator support in the torque converter. That ain't cheap!

After rolling to the staging beams, you'll be greeted by the voice of Chuck Sundstrom through a walkie-talkie sitting in the center console. When you knock out the pre-stage bulb Chuck says, "OK, take a deep breath and look down-track. Both hands on the wheel. Make sure it's clear. Relax." When you're ready to stage, keep pressing the brake pedal and push lightly on the throttle, sneaking the engine rpm up a hundred rpm at a time. Chuck coaxes you: "Higher. Higher. Just a little bit higher. Hold it there. Good." Bump the car into the beam an inch at a time by repeatedly lifting ever so slightly off the brake as you keep the engine against the torque converter at around 1,200 rpm. The goal is to stage as shallowly as possible, affording the longest possible head start on the timers and the lowest possible e.t. When the stage light flickers, watch the third yellow light. When you see the third bulb's filament begin to glow, lift the brake pedal and unleash the hounds of hell.

At this point the launch can go one of three ways: bog, blow the tires, or spin just the right amount. Ninety percent of the time, you'll do one of the first two things, but get it right, and the gates of heaven await. When you release the brake and transition into the gas, the key is to always have forward motion of the throttle. This ensures weight is always being transferred to the rear tires. If you lift, the run is over, so it's important that you don't get too far over your skis by going flat-out on the gas too early. That said, your goal is to get to full throttle as quickly as you can.

If you keep wheelspin from becoming incipient, the Demon's (and the Super Stock's) drag-specific traction control program will be able to chase it in real-time, but if you're putting on a smoke show, the computer will throw its hands up in surrender. All these critical decisions of man and machine happen in the first two-and-a-half seconds of the run, after which the outcome has been decided and you can pretty much hold on for the ride. We got it just right before our time ran out and nabbed a 9.72/130 in the Demon for our efforts. But what about the Super Stock?

We noticed no difference in the way the Super Stock operated on the starting line compared with the Demon, noting the exception of the trans brake on the Demon, which we did not use. (Both cars have active suspensions with drag-specific tuning, but only the Demon's hardware is drag-specific.) All functions for the line-lock control and the launch control worked the same as the Demon's, but after making a couple of runs in the Super Stock we got unsolicited comments from other Radford students that the exhaust note of the Super Stock was noticeably diminished compared to the Demon. We asked the Radford staff if the school's Demons had been modified in any way (beyond the rollbar, harnesses, and decals) and the answer was no, so we can only acknowledge that there could be a slightly more restrictive exhaust system in the Super Stock.

Our best run of the three passes we made in the Super Stock was a 10.41 at 123 mph, and this is significant in a couple of ways. First, we were able to run faster than Dodge's official e.t. of 10.50 at 131 mph. If experience with official Dodge stats on the Hellcat and Demon is any indication, the Super Stock figures are the result of factory testing in full production trim at the bleeding edge (ideal weather, ideal track conditions, experienced driver, lots of practice).

That said, even though our 10.41 e.t. was quicker than Dodge's e.t. (10.50) by 9 hundredths, it was slower by 8 mph (123 vs. 131 mph). We had been off Dodge's trap speed on the Demon by 10 mph (130 vs. 140), so the 8-mph drop in the Super Stock's trap speed falls roughly in line with that. The point is: heat kills power. Driving these cars in 95-degree heat at 5,000-foot density altitude compared to a cool winter's day in Florida with mineshaft air (where Dodge performed its official testing) more than accounts for the drop in trap speed and observed power in both cars.

In this author's mind, the Super Stock is capable of a 9-second footbrake pass in stock trim using all the vehicle's tools such as the Race Cooldown and Chiller, but it would require an ideal environment in which to do it. Make no mistake, though—on the track, the Demon is a superior quarter-mile machine to the Super Stock, and the difference isn't small, thanks to the Demon's exclusive 100-octane race tune, trans brake, skinny front-runner tires, and active drag suspension hardware. On the street and at a roll, however, the Demon's advantage evaporates to the slimmest of margins. Considering both vehicles are speed-limited to 168 mph due to the drag radials' speed rating, it's an academic advantage for most.

We'd just thrashed the two most powerful muscle cars Dodge has ever created on the quarter-mile in back-to-back testing. Now it was time for the bittersweet drive home. On a personal level, I've spent a career pushing Detroit for cars like this to become available to the public, and now that it's a reality, it will be gone too soon. We give Dodge a ton of credit for riding it out to the end; it's likely there will be a few more hot performers with Hemi power coming in the next 6 to 18 months, and the electrified muscle cars coming from Dodge will continue that trend. What's hard to predict is whether performance fans can wrap their minds around electrification, its steep learning curve, and its alien sonic profile. Will we long for the Super Stock's blower whine and snarling exhaust, or will we embrace hi-po EVs, relegating internal combustion to museums and car shows? Only time will tell. Until then, live the moment in a Dodge Super Stock.