V-10 Viper race cars

[ferrarifan]

NOO!! he's banned!!! This is my favorite thread!!!

[mehrshadvr4]

Originally Posted by Jaguar D-Type

The Viper Competition Coupe has an 8.3 liter V-10 with 520 hp and 540 lb-ft of torque.

check the link

http://www.vipercompetitioncoupe.com/

why only 520hp?

[Emery144]

There is more to a race car than hp such as weight.

Tommy Archer Wins From Pole at Road America

(LG's Corvette had a lot of restrictions at Road America though)

http://world-challenge.com/news/story.php?ID=393

[Emery144]

Triple victory at Spa

Patrick Bornhauser and Frédéric Bouvy won both FIA GT3 races at Spa in late July in their # 10 Racing Logistic Viper.

race one -

http://www.fiagt3.com/newsitem.php?key=72

race two -

http://www.fiagt3.com/newsitem.php?key=73

The #116 Signa Racing Patrick Chaillet Viper Comp Coupe of Patrick Chaillet, Laurent Nef, Loic Demans, and Christophe Geoffroy won the G3 class of the 24 Hours of Spa. It was the 58th running of the race and the first time since 2002 that a Viper has won the race.

http://www.fiagt.com/newsitem.php?key=1048

The first picture is from the GT3 race while the second is from the 24 Hours of Spa.

[struat11]

Dr. Z killed the Viper racing program

Dodge showed a racing-inspired car at the 2000 Detroit Auto Show, the Viper GTS/R to show the styling of the next generation Viper.

Check the bottom of this post for pictures.

Dr. Dieter Zetsche joined the research department of the then Daimler-Benz AG in 1976 and became assistant to the Development Manager in the Commercial Vehicles business unit in 1981.

Dr. Zetsche completed a doctorate in engineering in 1982 at the Technical University of Paderborn.

He became the CEO and President of the Chrysler Group in late 2000. His major early actions there included cutting 26,000 jobs from the payroll and shuttering six plants to help the reel Chrysler from the red ink. The last model year for Plymouth was 2001.

Two factory Viper GTS-Rs were pulled out of the American Le Mans Series at the end of the 2000 season.

Dr. Zetsche has been a member of the Board of Management of DaimlerChrysler AG since December 16, 1998, and Chairman of the Board of Management of DaimlerChrysler AG since January 1, 2006.

The Chrysler Group returned to profitability in the first quarter of 2004.

The following is from the July, 2003 issue of Sports Car International:

The coupe's enclosed body shell and full roll cage make the already stiff topless Viper even stiffer, while also providing better aerodynamics and crash protection. In addition, the Competition Coupe is much wider: The front track has been increased by nearly five inches and the rear by over two. The race car is also over ten inches longer than the street car - the wheelbase is the same, but the front and rear overhangs have been increased.

The fact that the Competition Coupe made it into production shows that Dodge didn't completely forget about fans of the old Viper GTS coupe and the GTS-R race car that dominated sports car racing in the late 90s. For those of you keeping score, the latter scored three consecutive wins in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, three FIA world championships [actually five, but the first three were the 1997 and 1998 championships in GT2 and the 1999, 2001, and 2002 championships in "GT"] and two American Le Mans Series championships. Many had hoped that the 2000 show car was the new race car; it wasn't.

At that point, a budget crunch and Dodge's decision to enter the NASCAR Winston Cup series doomed plans for a new all-out Viper racing program and, at best, shelved plans for a production coupe. However, the Viper faithful - fanatics who rank themselves by how many Vipers they own rather than whether they own one - still wanted a coupe they could at least race among themselves. Viper Club of America president Tony Estes pressed this request upon John Fernandez, who headed the Viper program at the time. Fernandez, an SCCA racer himself, didn't need much convincing, but those above him did.

When DaimlerChrysler head honcho Dieter Zetsche [Dr. Z in the car commercials] killed the Viper racing program, it was just five weeks from constructing a prototype of the Le Mans racer. There was a lot of good useful development work that had been done and there were still a few dollars in the budget when the Viper Club asked for a car suitable for club racing, so Fernandez steered the racing program in that direction.

This caused a tense moment when rumor leaked back to the boss that Fernandez was secretly continuing development of the new GTS-R in defiance of Zetsche's orders. Fernandez got the humbling opportunity to explain to a hopping-mad boss that, well, yes, he was developing a Viper race car, but it was a different Viper race car than the one he'd been expressly ordered not to build.

Once Zetsche was satisfied that the program would be financially self-supporting and wouldn't distract Team Viper from the task of building the production 2003 Viper SRT10 street car, Fernandez proceeded.

"We presented a five-year business case," says Fernandez. With the cars earning the company a profit, while providing racers a good value for their money, the future of the Competition Coupe should be secure. Says Fernandez, "We wanted to do it right so the program takes root and grows."

"Our main goals were to make the car safe and to make it a good value," says development engineer Eric Petersen. [Petersen was the suspension, steering, and brake engineer for the Viper GTS-R race car. He is the Lead Development Engineer on the Viper Competition Coupe.] That means that the really big-dollar engine parts, brakes and shocks were out. Also, while the production headlight shells are in place, the pricey high-intensity discharge guts aren't there. If a customer wants to go nighttime endurance racing, they can always put the lights in the car.

The team wanted a durable, dependable race car that needs little more than a tank of gas to go racing. And in the unfortunate event the driver experiences the dreaded "sky, grass, sky, grass" spin cycle, engineers wanted to maximize driver protection. Club racing is supposed to be fun, and it is no fun to get hurt or killed playing with your toys.

"We've designed a seat with better lateral support than all of the seats on the market," Petersen says. That means the Racetech carbon-fiber seat will keep the driver in place during a crash, for better protection: "It is hard to build a seat stiff enough so that it doesn't bend away at the head and shoulder in a crash."

The seat was specifically designed to accommodate the HANS neck protection [Head And Neck Support] device, and a center net is installed to the driver's right to restrict movement to that side of the car. "A lot of what we've done has come out of our work in NASCAR," says Petersen. Naturally, a six-point harness is included as well.

Despite the Viper's safety and simplicity, it remains a stupendously fast and capable car - top speed is a claimed 193 mph. So Dodge isn't selling the Competition Coupes to collectors, speculators and wannabes. The customer needs to present a racing license and resume to qualify to buy the car. "We don't recommend that this be their first race car," Petersen says.

The Viper Competition Coupe gives Viper nuts more than they could have hoped for. The first batch of 32 coupes sold for an absolute bargain price of $100,000. The next 30, also already sold, cost $118,000. All of those cars should be in customers' race shops by mid-summer [of 2003]. The next batch will cost more, by about the same margin as the first increase. If these numbers sound like serious money, you probably haven't done much race car shopping recently.

What's that hundred grand plus get you? How 'bout wind tunnel-sculpted bodywork made of carbon fiber, Kevlar and fiberglass; a carbon-fiber front splitter (that's the black paint scraper mounted under the front bumper); an adjustable rear wing; and a rear diffuser [and a rear spoiler]?

You get a production frame that is braced and gusseted. This, along with that full roll cage, results in a Coupe that is twice as torsionally rigid and 60 % more resistant to bending forces than the convertible from which it is derived.

Gone from the suspension are the street-spec rubber bushings; they are replaced with spherical bearings for more precise control. In go Moton monotube two-way adjustable gas shocks, fatter anti-roll bars with adjustable ends and three-piece BBS alloy wheels with Hoosier racing slicks. A Ricardo viscous speed-sensing limited-slip differential helps keep both of the massive 345-mm-wide rear Hoosiers on task.

In addition to the aforementioned racing seat - the car only has one - the interior is fitted with a Motec digital dashboard and data acquisition system, a necessary component for any serious race car. Plug in the laptop and all the driver's lies and exaggerations are laid bare.

The Lilliputian steering wheel pops off the steering column for easier ingress and egress. Toggle switches for the ignition, starter and other functions cross the center stack where the radio resides in the street car. To keep it out of harm's way, the 25-gallon Fuel Safe fuel cell is centrally located. A fire extinguisher can be summoned by a dashboard button.

Under the hood, changes are limited to a hotter cam, a smaller accessory drive pulley and a reprogrammed engine management system. The catalysts are missing from the exhaust, too (this makes 520 hp and 540 lb-ft of torque). The engine gets an upgraded oil cooler, and the transmission gets a cooler, too, along with a pump to circulate the oil. In addition, an optional lightened flywheel gives the engine even quicker throttle response than the street car's. One suprise is the absence of a dry sump system for engine oil. Team Viper engineers swear the deep "trap door"-style oil pan and ten-quart oil capacity make a dry sump unnecessary.

Even with all of this race-spec hardware, the Competition Coupe would get its butt handed to it by the old GTS-R race car. That car cost $325,000 and had [an available] 700 horsepower, so it oughta be faster. But the new Viper's speed potential still demands respect and skill. The stiff suspension and short, stiff sidewalls of the Hoosier racing slicks lend the car a kart-like feeling, but they also make it unforgiving. The street Viper soaks up track curbing and rumble strips that make the racer skitter nervously. But kept off the curbs, the Competition Coupe is more secure, and operates all the while on a higher performance plane. Lateral acceleration measures 1.25 g.

Not suprisingly, the side exhausts are loud. But the car doesn't approach the offensive racket of very high-compression race engines. The Viper proves it is possible to have proper race car sound without perforating anyone's eardrums - though even the street Viper is sufficiently loud to accidentaly set off car alarms in an office building parking lot when making a spirited departure (it was an accident, really!).

All enclosed front-engine cars struggle with cockpit heat, and the Viper GTS-R racers were nortoriously miserable places to work. But on a pleasantly warm 75-degree day in Phoenix, no excess heat was noticeable. The roll cage is reassuring, but, combined with the protective foam covering, can get kind of thick, especially around the left A-pillar, obscuring a good bit of the view ahead.

The clutch, like the steering, is lighter than one might expect, considering the clamping force needed to handle the Viper's 540 lb-ft of V10 fury. The shifter and Tremec T-56 6-speed gearbox are the very same parts used in the street car, but they not only feel capable in race duty, they feel like race parts. The precise, short-throw shifter demands little of driver's attention, and the transmission tolerates 5-2 downshifts while threshold braking from high speeds with no complaints. A one-piece input shaft in the transmssion was developed for the GTS-R race car. The gearbox doesn't just feel indestructible, it may actually be.

For our test, the Comp Coupe was set up with pronounced understeer - easily changed with different anti-roll bar, shock and tire pressure settings. It is a safer setup, but slower than more neutral or slightly oversteer-biased settings. However, the Viper offers fast, fast relief from the heartburn of understeer in the form of instantly available power oversteer.

On the tight Firebird test course we used only second and third gears, but that still meant reaching 120 mph at the end of the straight. The car never breaks a sweat and seems to regard this slow stuff with indifference. The challenge for the driver is to pour on the power in measured doses, especially while changing direction, to maintain rear traction. The car rewards finesse with reduced wheelspin and better stability.

A day of pounding by journalists made no impression on the Viper. Unlike some other cars we've tested, everything that worked in the morning still worked on the afternoon. Every part of the car proved well considered and well executed.

[moparman1994]

those are ****ing cool.

[jeffolsoned]

will dodge make a new viper for le mans now that the chrysler corp. has been sold?