Dodge Viper GTS-R

European sports car racing in the late 1990s was a world of carbon monocoques, sequential gearboxes and pit walls that smelled of ozone. Into it drove a car with a cast-iron-derived pushrod V10, leaf-adjacent manners and a soundtrack that made GT1 prototypes sound like appliances.

It should not have worked. It worked comprehensively. Class victories at Le Mans in 1998, 1999 and 2000; FIA GT championships; and then, at the 2000 Rolex 24 at Daytona, an outright win — a production-derived GT car beating the prototypes, which is the motorsport equivalent of the snake eating the mongoose.

The genius of the GTS-R was that it never pretended to be sophisticated. It had enormous frontal area and enormous torque, and it used the second to pay for the first. Endurance racing rewards machines that do not care. The Viper did not care. It ran for twenty-four hours at a time with the mechanical serenity of an animal that has never once questioned whether it belongs.

Chrysler eventually withdrew, as manufacturers do, and the customer cars kept winning for years afterwards in the hands of people who had bought a used race car and discovered it was still the fastest thing in the paddock.

The Ophidiary notes with satisfaction that the GTS-R’s dominant era coincided almost exactly with the period in which European manufacturers were spending fortunes trying to homologate road cars that were secretly prototypes. The Americans just brought an actual road car with the roof welded on.