The Dodge Challenger Hellcat was brought into this world to dominate drag strips. The problem is it didn’t really work out that way for Dodge. The car has incredible amounts of power but along with all those horses came a lot of issues as well. The biggest issue is putting the power down. There are cars out there managing to efficiently transfer over 700 HP to the road through solely two wheels but the Challenger is not one of them, right from the factory. With non-street-legal tires, it’s a drag-strip monster but it struggles with regular road tires.
If you’ve ever seen a McLaren 720S drag racing, you probably know it’s a real monster of a car. It demolishes some pretty fast all-wheel drive adversaries thanks to its intelligent rear axle. However, the same definitely can’t be said about the Challenger. That becomes even more obvious when we’re talking about a manual model and if we’re looking at it going up against the BMW M5.
The new M5 comes with a clever all-wheel drive system that actually allows you to send the power to the rear wheels alone if you want to. That’s not necessarily recommended though, as the 625 PS the Competition M5 has will turn the rear tires into a pile of rubber in a matter of seconds. Get it in all-wheel drive mode and the launch should get you to 60 mph in about 3 seconds. The guys from coches.net put the two against each other in a drag race to see what’s what.
The Hellcat they had for this test was an older model with 707 HP instead of the updated version which has 717 HP coming out of the 6.2-liter supercharged engine. It was also a manual so you know launching it won’t be easy. The two cars go at it from standstill twice.
The first time round, the M5 uses Launch Control and simply demolishes the Hellcat thanks to its superior traction. To even things out a little, the second race is done without launch control. Not only that but the M5 is put in RWD mode and that led to a whole different result.
Check it out!
