Got this from the guys at "DiRT"
ROYAL FORD
This sedan will get you all charged up
By Royal Ford | May 22, 2005
ALTON, Va. -- It is hard enough to thread a Porsche GT3 through the
S-curves, over rising and falling terrain, and corkscrew the multiple apex
corners of the tortuous track at Virginia International Raceway. I've done
it in that car and in a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, and every time I thought
it was a track designed by the magician/sadomasochist team of Penn and
Teller -- all full of trickery and pain.
Yet here I was in a four-door sedan, a rumbling two tons of American muscle
car, on the same snaking route.
I tossed it into the corners on the same lines as I did the
super-performance cars. Accelerated out of apex on a descending S-curve as I
would in the Porsche. Hit the double apex Oak Tree Corner -- come in at
apex, let the car drift out, swing back in to apex, let the car drift out
again. Then accelerate down the straight where speeds top 100 miles per hour
as you climb a straightaway that disappears into the sky, only to get into
late-as-possible braking before the track drops away into corners yet again.
The sedan did it all. Yet this is a ''sedan" of racing heritage, for it is
the 2006 Dodge Charger, fabulous muscle car of the 1960s and '70s, famed
race car associated with a guy named Petty. It was a coupe back then. It's a
sedan now, yet carries the stance and body lines of a coupe. Call it the
rebirth of the muscle coupe in utilitarian form. Who'd have thought, back
then, that a Charger would some day feature a fold-down, 60/40 split rear
seat so snowboarders could carry their gear?
''It is absolutely critical that Dodge get back in the car market," said
George Murphy, senior vice president of global sales and marketing. He meant
that while Dodge has had major success in the minivan and pickup truck
domain, its car sales have lagged. And just as Chrysler has seen a comeback
led by its wildly popular 300 series of cars, Dodge hopes to continue on its
sibling's track with cars such as the Magnum station wagon and, now, the
Charger, in many forms.
The Charger will be offered in a range of options that includes six models.
All feature a distinct ridge that runs from the lower fascia, up through the
center grille, and bisects the hood. Snake-eye headlamps give it what Jeff
Gale of the Chrysler design staff called ''an almost sneering attitude." And
a belt line that starts high in the front and drops through the rear door
rises again at the rear fender where, Gale said, ''the power is" -- meaning
it looks like the powerful rear flank of a thoroughbred.
The base model is an SE featuring a 3.5-liter V-6 with 250 horsepower, and
17-inch wheels and a base price about $23,000.
You climb from there to the SXT, same engine, split rear seat, power
adjustable driver's seat, starting at $26,000.
Then comes the R/T (Road/Track) Charger, with a 340-horsepower Hemi engine,
18-inch wheels, performance brakes, and audio/entertainment features and a
more aggressive suspension, at $30,000. The performance group package here
adds 10 horsepower and $2,000.
Jump to the Daytona package at $32,500 and exhaust tuning brings you to 350
ponies. The exhaust note, as noticed on the track, gets distinctly
smoky/throaty here.
Coming in the fall (the others can be had right now) is an SRT8 Charger with
a 6.1-liter Hemi and 425 horsepower. No pricing announced on this one yet.
Chargers, in various forms, feature stability control systems that can be
toned down for more driver feel, driver cockpits that put you in a direct
gaze with brow-shaped gauges, and five-speed automatic transmissions with
manual option. In the performance models, the manual option ''learns" what
kind of driver you are and handles upshifts and downshifts accordingly.
Indeed, during hot laps at the Virginia International Raceway my car would
not upshift from second to third (a bane of some automatics) as I screeched
toward apex in second gear. It knew what I wanted and let me do it.
With traction control toned down, I was able to steer with the throttle,
letting the back end kick out just for fun, fixing it easily with the
slightest of counter-steer.
I could have been Neil Bonnett driving the last Dodge Charger to a NASCAR
win in 1977 in California (and I wonder how that hot rod would stack up
against the street legal SRT8 coming soon). Of course I was not.
Yet, in a marketing coup, just 48 hours after the Dodge folks let us play
race car driver in Virginia, a Dodge Charger, driven by young Kasey Kahne,
rolled into the winners' circle at Richmond (Va.) International Raceway --
the first Charger there in three decades.
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