Forget hypercars, hyper muscle cars are the next big thing. That’s what the folks at Dodge are hoping as they prepare to launch the new Copperhead SRT that was announced at the Stellantis Investor Day presentation.
The car is set to slot into the lineup above the Charger where the Viper used to live, but will be more like a beefed-up Charger than a sleek two-seat sports car.
In fact, when it was secretly shown to a handful of journalists, a lot of them initially thought it was another Charger variant with a more streamlined nose and a humungous wing, but Tim Kuniskis, the head of all of the North American Stellantis brands including Dodge and SRT, said it has nothing to do with the Charger.
“There are some synergies built into that car. SRT only works if SRT can take sunken investments from around the globe and leverage those. Because if you try to make high-performance halo cars and you try to make them bespoke, it will never pay back. I mean, it’s—it’s like racing for the sake of racing. I mean, it’s ego. You have to take investments that are already sunk and then leverage those. So there’s stuff in that car that are production-intent in other things that we’ll leverage very heavily,” he told The Drivecast podcast.
Kuniskis said the Charger’s proportions, which include a long wheelbase to accommodate the electric Charger Daytona’s batteries and short overhangs, wouldn’t work for the Copperhead. So what is it?
Well, the only other all-new rear-wheel-drive model announced at the event was a new Maserati sports car. Looking at the teaser images of the pari hidden under sheets, we think there’s a good chance they are related. But what will be under its long hood bulge?
Kuniskis said not to expect a Hemi or Hellcat and that he knows what they’d like to put under there, but they’re still working on “some new technology” that will be revealed in August. He did discount the possibility that it will be a hybrid, because he wants to future-proof it as a “keeper” but didn’t offer any other obvious hints.
The only new internal combustion related-technology we could come across that Stellantis is working on is a Dual Fuel Internal Combustion Engine System it patented that switches between hydrocarbon (gas/diesel) fuel and hydrogen, but it is focused on reducing emissions, not improving performance.
The other curveball we’re going to throw out there is that last year, Kuniskis was spotted at Hennessey Performance, where they modify Ram, Jeep and Dodge products, checking out its new 1,700 hp Dodge Challenger SRT Demon build.
It swapped the stock 1,025 hp engine’s supercharger for a pair of Precision PT6870 turbochargers, which is a relatively new technology that uses lightweight, aerodynamically efficient rotors and blades and air-cooled bearings to reduce lag while still delivering high end boost like a larger turbo.
Hennessey has an even more powerful engine that it uses in its 2,031 hp Venom F5 hypercar. It’s a 6.6-liter V8 developed with Ilmor Engineering that has two Precision PT6870 and “oval” pistons. The same Illmor that builds the V8 engines for Ram’s NASCAR trucks Now, all pistons are slightly oval to account for heat expansion and thrust force against the sides of the cylinders, but Hennessey made a point to call it out like it is a particularly noteworthy development. The last time we asked it for an elaboration, it said it wasn’t ready to realease all of the information, but a CAD image included in a video about the engine doesn’t seem to depict a particularly oblong cylinder.
True oval pistons were once considered a next big thing, with Honda’s work on them being the most famous. It developed a motorcycle engine with pill-shaped piston heads connected to two rods that could accommodate eight valves per cylinder. The odd design made them expensive to build and unreliable, however, and they were banned from racing before they could displace traditional piston designs.
More recently, Ferrari, which shares ownership with Stellantis and Dodge, filed a patent for an V12 engine with oval pistons connected to single rods. Ferrari’s design appears to be primarily aimed at reducing the length of a V12 engine by squishing the cylinders.
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In any event, the Copperhead sounds like it is very much a work in progress that will hopefully be released sometime between now and 2030, although nothing is confirmed at this point.
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