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Dodge pulls high performance trigger
Ram SRT-10 pickup has power bragging rights in its sights
By Bob English
Thursday, December 4, 2003
WALLAND, Tennessee - If you're looking for the biggest, most outrageous bang for your Christmas shopping buck, here are my top two suggestions: Dodge's new Ram SRT-10 pickup, due in showrooms at the end of this month, or Smith & Wesson's new Model 500 S&W Magnum handgun.
Drop the hammer on either and you'll be the instantaneous beneficiary of enough torque and recoil to send a seismic jolt to the core of your very being.
Three decades ago Dirty Harry (a.k.a. Clint Eastwood) made a name for himself with a Smith & Wesson .44 calibre magnum wheel-gun that laid claim to be the most powerful pistol in the world and the tag line "go ahead, make my day." A few years ago the Ford Motor Company unleashed a big-bore brute of its own - a full-size F-l50 pickup with a 5.4-litre V8, generating 380 horsepower and 450 lb-ft of torque. No snappy lines accompanied it, but its name, Lightning, served as a statement of intent no less intimidating than Dirty Harry's.
More potent pistols eclipsed Dirty Harry's outsized cannon over the years, but Smith & Wesson's recently introduced Model 500 has regained the top gun crown for the company. And the Ram SRT-10, with its Viper powerplant, has just transferred top-performance truck laurels from Ford to Dodge.
The world's most powerful revolver and pickup truck may seem like two entirely dissimilar devices, but it turns out they have some things in common. For starters, both are physically daunting. The double-action revolver (designed for big game hunting) weighs in at over two kilograms and is 381 mm long from grip to muzzle. This is simply monstrous in handgun terms. The Ram SRT-10 squashes the scales with a curb weight of 2270 kg and is 5159 mm bumper-to-bumper. It comes with wind tunnel-tuned, NASCAR truck racing series-inspired ground-effect mouldings, deep front fascia with integrated splitter, power-bulged hood, massive grille and air intakes, an aluminum racing-style fuel filler cap, deep rear fascia and a rear wing (that can be stowed in the bed) that reduces rear lift, as well as drag. Combined with its ultra-wide, low-profile tires on 22-inch polished rims and lowered ride, all this gives it a look that's menacing in black and no less intimidating in red or silver.
Changes inside include cool items such as a big red Viper engine start button and shift knob, and heavily-bolstered, racing-style, leather-clad seats with perforated suede inserts.
SRT-10 logos are embroidered in the headrests. There's also a new gauge cluster with satin silver-faced instruments. A separate oil temp gauge is located on the A-pillar. The centre stack is also trimmed in satin silver and houses a 508-watt Infinity sound system. Pedals are racy alloy units.
But power is what we were talking about here wasn't it?
The Smith & Wesson's barrel and 5-round cylinder are bored to take a massive .50 calibre round, fired from a magnum cartridge more than 50 mm in length. The Model 500 generates a nuclear-level 2,600 lb-ft of muzzle energy and blasts out a 275-grain slug at 1,665 feet-per-second. Only the gun's mass keeps recoil manageable. These numbers, incidentally, make a 9 mm gun look like a pellet pistol.
The people at DaimlerChrysler's Performance Vehicle Operations (PVO), given the task of creating the Ram SRT-10, are obviously of a like mind when it comes to power. "If it's worth doing, it's sometimes worth overdoing," says the SRT-10 handout, and "bad, bold and bitchin'" were the design criteria, according to one design team member I spoke with.
The Ram SRT-10's bore and stroke add up to a displacement of 8.3-litres, shared out among 10 cylinders, making it the biggest engine ever in a factory pickup. This is the same V10 engine Dodge uses to power its Viper sports car, and it produces a prodigious 500 hp at 5,600 rpm and 525 lb-ft of torque at 4,200 revs in the Ram. It's ably backed by a 6-speed manual gearbox with a Hurst shifter.
Underneath is a super-stiff, hydroformed frame, to which is attached a modified version of the Ram's short arm/long arm independent front suspension and a well-located Dana live rear axle. The suspension has been lowered 25 mm up front and 67 mm at the rear, with shorter and stiffer springs controlled by Bilstein mono-tube shocks. There's a new front steering knuckle and anti-roll bar, and an anti-roll bar in the back along with under-slung rear springs and a system to control axle hop. Big brake rotors front and rear look sharp with their red-painted calipers. Tires are meaty 305/40YR22 Pirelli Scorpion Zeros.
I haven't fired the Model 500, but I did get to pull the trigger a few times on the Ram SRT-10 during a drive through the Tennessee backwoods. It's hard to describe what it's like to have something this big go so fast. Dial up a few revs, let out the clutch and twin streaks of rubber appear in your wake through a haze of blue smoke, propelling you to 100 km/h in about 5.5 seconds.
Its acceleration isn't as mind-blowing and violent as the Viper, since like the Smith & Wesson, the SRT-10's mass takes off some of the edge. But it is ungodly quick. If you worked your way up through all the gears you'd see just over 240 km/h on the speedo. And it steers and handles with surprising precision and capability too, keeping in mind all the weight the tires have to cope with. It stops just as well as it goes too.
Is the very idea of a Ram SRT-10 over-the-top silly? Certainly. Is it huge fun? Definitely. Why'd they do it? Because they could. And that's a more than good enough reason for me.
Immediate competition:
Chevrolet Silverado SS,
Ford F-150 Lightning
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