When it comes to big names at SEMA, there’s not many bigger than SpeedKore Performance.
If you’ve not heard the name before, we can fill in some of the blanks. SpeedKore’s Dodge Charger “Tantrum” won the Gran Turismo Award for best domestic in 2015, losing out to Sung Kang’s 240Z for the overall prize. It also went on to star in the Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment of the relentless Fast and Furious movie franchise.
Well, the Tantrum is back for 2018 and, unusually, SpeedKore has detuned it. The Charger’s original powerplant was a regular old twin-turbo nine-liter V8 marine racing engine, good for over 1,600hp. For this Evolution model, the company has opted to go a little more down-to-Earth, with a 6.2-liter V8 from a Dodge Challenger SRT Demon. That’s still worth a pretty solid 966hp, with SpeedKore’s tweaks, but the Wisconsin speed shop says its a little easier to drive this way.
However, it’s what the engine sits in that’s the show-stopper this time round. There’s a brand-new steel box-frame chassis, 2″ by 3″, designed and built by SpeedKore itself. The floorpan and transmission tunnel are all-aluminum, and there’s a rigid, 14-point roll cage. Everything else is carbon-fiber.
The Evolution’s entire body is carbon-fiber, including a single-piece roof panel made in SpeedKore’s own specialist autoclave. To make the most of it, the company finishes the entire car in a polished clear coat, so you can see the carbon-fiber weave.
There’s a completely reworked interior, with unique dashboard, steering wheel and shifter. The Recaro bucket seats are, like the rest of the interior, trimmed in leather, aluminum and carbon-fiber.
To provide some contrast, SpeedKore uses billet aluminum for several interior and exterior pieces — like the door handles and fuel filler cap. These all feature a bronze-nickel coating, matching the wide HRE wheels — 19×10-inch at the front, 20×12-inch at the rear. These cover 15-inch Brembo brake discs, with six-pot calipers on the front and four-pots on the rear.
All in, the Charger Evolution weighs 3,200lb, which gives it roughly the same power-to-weight ratio as the McLaren Speedtail.
You can see the Charger Evolution at the Meguiar’s booth, in the Central Hall, throughout the 2018 SEMA Show. It isn’t the only SpeedKore creation at the show either: the crew also brought a carbon-bodied Mustang GT350 and a 1,400hp Dodge Demon.
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