2007 Dodge Ram 2500 Slt Cummins Custom Built 4x4 on 2040-cars

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Cold start comparison: 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio vs. 2013 Dodge Challenger SRT8

The 2020 Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio is a five-seat, compact luxury sport sedan packing 505 horsepower thanks to a 2.9-liter twin-turbocharged V6. My personal 2013 Dodge Challenger SRT8 392 is ... well ... not. It's a full-sized muscle coupe whose iron-block 6.4-liter V8 makes 470 hp in the very traditional way: it's freakin' huge, like everything else about the car.  On paper, these two have nothing in common beyond the fact that they were built by the same multi-national manufacturing entity.  But if paper were the be-all and end-all of automotive rankings, everybody would buy the same car. And we don't, especially as enthusiasts. Whether it's looks or tuning or vague "intangibles" or something as simple as the way a car sounds, we often put a priority on the things that trigger our emotions rather than setting out to simply buy whatever the "best" car is at that particular moment.  So, what do these two have in common? They both sound really, really good. Like looks, sounds are subjective. While a rubric most assuredly exists in the world of marketing (attraction is as much a science as any other human response), we have no way of objectively scoring the beauty of either of these cars, and the same applies to the qualities of the sound waves being emitted through their tail pipes.  But we can measure how loud they are. In fact, there's even an app for that. Dozens, as it turns out. So, I picked one at random that recorded peak loudness levels, and set off to conduct an entirely pointless and only vaguely scientific experiment with the two cars that happened to be in my garage at the same time.  For the test, I opened up a window and cracked the garage door (so as not to inflict carbon monoxide poisoning upon myself in the name of discovery), and then placed my phone on a tripod behind the center of each car's trunk lid. I fired each one up and let the app do the rest. I then placed my GoPro on top of the trunk for each test so that I could review the video afterward for any anomalies.  I started with the Challenger. The 6.4-liter Hemi under the hood of this big coupe is essentially the same lump found under the hood of quite a few Ram pickups, and it has the accessories to prove it. Its starter is loud and distinctive. Almost as loud, it turns out, as the exhaust itself. As its loud pew-pew faded behind the V8's barking cold start, we recorded a peak of 83.7 decibels. In the app's judgment, that's roughly the equivalent of a busy street.

Watch this Dodge Viper get clawed to death

There's a scene in the James Bond movie, Casino Royale, where Daniel Craig's Agent 007 is captured by villain Le Chiffre, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Le Chiffre tortures Bond in a scene that is rather difficult to watch (especially for blokes) and impossible to describe on these digital pages (Google at your own risk). This video is the automotive equivalent of the Casino Royale torture scene.
It shows a Dodge Viper - a late, first-generation GTS judging by the center-exit exhausts - getting assaulted by a giant piece of heavy equipment. The large claw shows no mercy on the V10-powered sports car, rending its muscular curves into pieces and then running it over, just for good measure. It's a painful video to watch (and hear!), made worse because we don't know what the Viper did to deserve such a fate. About a third of the way through the video, the cameraman indicates that the man with the claw is a new operator from Chrysler, and it appears there may be some fire damage, but beyond that, we don't have much to go on.
Scroll down for the video but be warned, it isn't for the faint of heart.

Race Recap: Rolex 24 at Daytona was fast and feisty

Let the record show that victory at the 2015 Rolex 24 at Daytona went to the No. 02 Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates Target/Ford EcoBoost Riley DP driven by Verizon IndyCar drivers Scott Dixon and Tony Kanaan and NASCAR drivers Jamie McMurray and Kyle Larson. The winner did 740 laps to cover 2,634.3 miles in 24 hours and 57.667 seconds. That's a statement to this year's pace in spite of 18 cautions, two more than last year: the Michael Shank Racing Ligier got pole with a time of 1:39.194, slower than last year's pole time of 1:38.270; however, the winning car last year only did 695 laps. The fight for top honors was shaved to a four-car battle over the first third of the event. The No. 02 Ganassi car took the lead on the first lap, swapping it well into the night with the No. 01 Ganassi car, the No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing Corvette DP, and the defending champion No. 5 Action Express Corvette DP, all of them staying within about 20 seconds of one another. The Action Express car had a fuel connector come loose and lost three laps getting towed back to the pits to have it reattached, but was back in the lead 18 hours in. The No. 01 Ganassi car dropped out with recurring clutch problems 22 hours in, retiring not long after. A race-within-the-race is where the concluding action happened, a seven minute, 30-second dash from the end of the last caution to the checkered flag. During the penultimate pit stops with an hour to go, Dixon was in second place followed Jordan Taylor in the Wayne Taylor Racing DP into the pits but beat him out, taking the lead. The Action Express car was in third. In the last pit stops of the race, Dixon gained even more time, getting a four-second advantage over Taylor. Then a full-course caution came out twenty minutes before the finish when a Prototype Challenge car hit the wall and caught fire, bunching up the field. That closed the pits, but the Wayne Taylor Racing car had to pit during that yellow because of a miscalculation of driver time. No driver can be behind the wheel for more than four hours in a six-hour period but Jordan Taylor was going to go over, so he came in to swap out for brother Ricky. That cost the team any chance of second place, since they took an additional drive-through penalty for entering closed pits. When the track went green again, Sebastien Bourdais in the Action Express car stayed all over Dixon for the final five laps but couldn't get around him.