2021 Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack Widebody First Test: Get Lit, Baby

Think of the 2021 Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack Widebody as a rolling frat party. It's National Lampoon's Animal House on ultra-fat tires. (Sidebar: Can you imagine the Deathmobile D-Day could make out of this?) Everything about the Dodge Charger 392 is loud, obnoxious, uncouth, politically incorrect, antisocial, and marvelous. It rolls off the assembly line on double-secret probation, and every revolution of its 6.4-liter naturally aspirated noisemaker is a tiny Bluto devil whispering bad ideas in the driver's ear.

The Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack Widebody variant is one we somehow missed out on testing when it hit the market for 2020. We'll blame the pandemic. The 21V Widebody Package adds $5,995 to the price of a Dodge Charger 392 and includes fender flares, a competition suspension with adaptive damping, Brembo six-piston brakes, a performance-shift indicator, and 305/35 20-inch performance tires on 11- x 20-inch forged aluminum "Devil's Rim" wheels. (This gear all comes standard on the even naughtier Charger Hellcat and pure-evil Charger Hellcat Redeye.)

The very instant this devilish 2021 Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack Widebody arrived in our parking lot, we drove it right up onto a U-Haul car trailer hitched to our long-term 2021 Truck of the Year Ram 1500 TRX, its sidewalls rubbing the outer edges of the trailer on both sides. We then pointed this diabolical rig north toward Ubly Dragway in Michigan's thumb to record some numbers.

We test a lot of cars that'll lay down acceleration run after acceleration run differing by only a couple tenths, but the 2021 Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack Widebody is one that rewards taking some time to try out all the dragstrip options. Like the line-lock feature that lets you firmly apply the brakes, and then holds only the fronts while you roast the rears to heat them up for a run. Or the fully programmable launch-control system that allows you to choose what rpm the car will launch at during a brake-torque (pedal overlap) start. The available rev range spans from 1,200 to 3,300 rpm.

While we were at an official dragstrip, we did not launch in the "Christmas tree" area, which is prepped with a resin-based compound called PJ1 TrackBite (formerly known as VHT) that gives drag-racing slick tires their wheelie-inducing bite. On the normal asphalt pavement ahead of the launch box and at the opposite end of the strip (when running backward), heating the tires with a burnout did not improve our times. And as for the launch-control revs, on dry asphalt less is more. Our best run involved a launch at about 1,300 rpm and maybe two-thirds throttle, with judicious roll-on to full throttle only as the tires hooked up. It's hard to imagine a surface that would reward a 3,300-rpm launch with anything but a dense cloud of Pirelli P Zero smoke.

We tripped the (satellite-calculated) quarter-mile "lights" in 12.7 seconds at 110.7 mph, passing through 60 mph in 4.2 seconds and 100 mph in 10.1 seconds along the way.

Understand those figures reflect software that subtracts a 1-foot roll-out and applies a weather correction (in this case a mild one, primarily correcting for the 78 percent humidity, as the 73-degree temperature and 29.53-in-Hg barometric pressure measured very near the standards we correct to). It's unclear whether the Dodge Performance Pages Drag Racing app computes a rollout or any weather correction (the car has an exterior thermometer), but somehow the app recorded 4.3 seconds to 60 mph, 10.1 seconds to 100 mph, and a 12.8-second 107-mph quarter-mile run. That level of accuracy certainly suggests the car is only reading the front wheel-speed sensors, not the spinning rears.

Marginally better than the narrow-body and about as well as a Charger Hellcat Redeye on the same wide tires. Our best stop from 60 mph on Ubly's pavement measured 107 feet, precisely the same as the Redeye. Ditto max-lateral acceleration, which measured 0.94 g. Sadly we don't presently have a Michigan venue that can accommodate our figure-eight course, but we can imagine this 2021 Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack Widebody will only trail its Hellcat big brother by a smidge, if at all; its 312-hp, 232-lb-ft engine-output deficit would likely slow corner exits by just a bit more than its 116-pound weight advantage helps it in the transitions.

C'mon. There is no competition. Pontiac's G8 came close, but the last of those was built in June 2009. The sedans that come close on power are smaller and a little more expensive; sedans this big and powerful are a lot more expensive.

In fact, you'll struggle to find a sedan offering half this much hooning fun for less than half again as much money. The all-wheel-drive Tesla Model 3 Long Range starts at $50,190 and can hit 60 mph in 4.0 seconds en route to a 12.5-second quarter mile at 113.1 mph, but the Tesla has 3-4 inches less front and rear shoulder room and almost 5 inches less rear legroom, not to mention 100 percent less angry V-8 exhaust music. Let's face it: The Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack Widebody is the ultimate anti-Tesla.

This is not serious A-to-B transportation; it's engineered fun. Only a planet terrorist would commute 100 miles per day in a car like this. Rather, the Dodge Charger 392 is designed for getting away from traffic and playing with all the screens and functions. Watching dyno traces of acceleration runs, showing your buddies the concentric round horsepower, torque, and oil-pressure gauges. It's about holding drifts and playing with the line-locker as you work to lower your 60-foot times at the dragstrip. Try doing that in an Audi RS5 Sportback or Mercedes-AMG C63 sedan. And in this 2021 Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack Widebody configuration, most people will be utterly gobsmacked to learn there are two Charger versions that are more powerful. (Who could possibly need quicker acceleration than this in a sedan so large?!)

If you love America, acceleration, V-8 noise, and life in general, absofrigginlutely. Get one quick before your only opportunity to do 0 to 60 mph in the 4s for around $60,000 is in an antiseptic Earth-hugging electric car, 'cuz the experience in this rig is very different. We mourn for the generations that follow—generations that may never have the chance to experience this level of fossil-fuel-burning fabulosity. God bless America.