Dodge Viper

The Viper is the only car in this book that was named by committee and still turned out honest.

Its conception is well documented and slightly unbelievable. Bob Lutz, then at Chrysler, wanted a modern Cobra. Tom Gale drew it. Carroll Shelby — the man from Book I, still alive, still uninterested in moderation — was brought in as a consultant, which meant the founding serpent laid hands on the successor. The engine was an 8.0-litre V10 originally intended for pickup trucks, sent to Lamborghini, then a Chrysler subsidiary, to be recast in aluminium. A supercar powered by a truck motor that an Italian supercar company was asked to make lighter is a sentence that could only have been written in 1989.

What arrived in 1992 was not a sports car in the European sense. It had no exterior door handles. It had no side windows worth the name — you got zip-in plastic curtains and an attitude. It had no anti-lock brakes and no traction control, on the reasoning, never quite stated aloud, that a person who buys a car called Viper has already been warned by the badge.

And it had the side pipes. The exhaust exited beneath the sills, directly under where a human calf goes when a human gets out of a car, and it burned people. Not occasionally. Routinely. Owners developed a specific dismount. There is no better emblem of the entire ophidian naming tradition than a car that marks its handlers with a scar in the same place every time.

The Viper improved over five generations without ever becoming polite. The GTS coupé of 1996 added a roof with a double-bubble in it, because the designers wore helmets and the roof had to accommodate them, which is the correct order of priorities. The final Gen V cars had 8.4 litres and 645 horsepower and a chassis that could be driven quickly by a normal person, which some observers considered a betrayal and which was in fact just maturity.

It died in 2017 because of side-curtain airbag regulations and a market that had moved to twin-turbo V8s with dual-clutch gearboxes. It died as the last naturally aspirated, front-mid-engined, manual-only, ten-cylinder production car anyone will ever sell, and it never once had a paddle behind the wheel.

A viper, in the field, does not chase. It waits, coiled, with its head withdrawn and its body loaded, and it strikes only across the very short distance in which it is guaranteed to win. This is precisely the Dodge Viper’s relationship to the corner exit. It does not want the long game. It wants the eighty feet in which physics is on its side.

The name was not decoration. Chrysler could have called it the Challenger. It called it the Viper, and then spent twenty-five years being held to it.