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2020 Dodge Challenger Drag Pak comes solely with supercharged power

The Dodge Challenger Drag Pak has returned for 2020, five years after the last one arrived, and two years after it began development. And while in many ways it looks like past Drag Paks, there are a number of tweaks that should make this the fastest and most capable factory drag car yet from Mopar. Unlike the last model, only a supercharged 354-cubic-inch (5.8-liter for the imperically challenged) V8 is available. Mopar says it's more powerful than its predecessor, though exact horsepower wasn't given. It did confirm that the previous car was capable of a stunning 1,200 horsepower. The engine is coupled solely to a three-speed automatic transmission with a manual shifter. 2020 Dodge Challenger Drag Pak View 17 Photos Supporting the massive engine are many chassis, suspension and driveline enhancements. The independent rear suspension and axles are gone in favor of a solid axle from Strange and a four-link suspension. The front remains stock except for double-adjustable Bilstein shocks. The engine is mounted to a subframe member that's beneficial both to weight distribution and center of gravity. The car gets high-performance brakes and custom Weld Racing wheels with "DRAGPAK" engraved on them. The interior features a welded-in roll cage certified for quarter-mile times as quick as 7.5 seconds. Helping keep the car planted without increasing drag too much are front and rear spoilers from the road-going Challenger, a new addition compared with the previous car. Every Drag Pak car also comes standard with a wheelie bar and parachute. Dodge will only build 50 of these cars, and they'll only be offered as race cars that aren't legal for the street. The cars will be eligible for competing in sportsman classes in NHRA and NMCA drag racing series. Pricing and availability hasn't been set yet, but will be revealed sometime next year.

Auto Mergers and Acquisitions: Suicide or salvation?

We love the Moses figure. A savior riding in from stage right with the ideas, the smarts, and the scrappiness to put things right. Alan Mullaly. Carroll Shelby. Lee Iacocca. Andrew Carnegie. Steve Jobs. Elon Musk. Bart Simpson. Sergio Marchionne does not likely view himself with Moses-like optics, but the CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles recently gave a remarkable, perhaps prophetic interview with Automotive News about his interest and the inevitability of merging with a potential automotive partner like General Motors. Marchionne has been overtly public about his notion that GM must merge with FCA. For a bit of context, GM sold 9.9 million vehicles in 2014, posting $2.8 billion in net income, while FCA sold 4.75 million units and earned $2.4 billion in net income, painting a very rosy FCA earnings-to-sales picture. But that's not the entire picture. Most people in the auto industry still remember the trainwreck that was the DaimlerChrysler "merger" written in what turned out to be sand in 1998. It proved to be a master class in how not to fuse two companies, two cultures, two continents, and two management teams. Oh, it worked for the two individuals at both helms pre-merger. They got silly rich. And the industry itself was in a misty romance at the time with mergers and acquisitions. BMW bought Rolls-Royce. Volkswagen Group bought Bentley, Bugatti, and Lamborghini, putting all three brands into their rightful place in both products and positioning. No marriages there, so no false pretense. Finally, Nissan and Renault got married in 1999. A successful marriage requires several rare elements in this atmosphere of gas fumes and power lust. But a successful marriage requires several rare elements in this atmosphere of gas fumes and power lust, the principle part being honesty. Daimler and Chrysler lied to each other. The heads of each unit, the product planners, and finance all presented their then-current and long-range forecasts to each other with less-than-forthright accuracy. Daimler was the far greater equal and no one from the Chrysler side enjoyed that. The cultures were entirely different, too, and little was done to bridge that gap. Which brings me back to the present overtures by Marchionne to GM. "There are varying degrees of hugs," Marchionne stated in the Automotive News piece. "I can hug you nicely, I can hug you tightly, I can hug you like a bear, I can really hug you." Seriously?

Over 1,000 Ram pickups lap Nurburgring in world record parade

How many Ram trucks would you think you'd see in one place anywhere outside the US? If you by any chance happened to be at the Nurburgring Nordschleife track in Germany the past weekend, you would have seen a great deal of them, as Ram enthusiasts grouped together to set a Guinness World Record. The record called for as many pick-up trucks as possible to form a parade, with the previous, Mexican-set record having consisted of 638 trucks; the earlier Ram-specific record featured 451 trucks. On November 5th, as many as 1,152 Ram trucks gathered at the 'Ring, and of course a lap of the Nordschleife track was the place for the actual parade. This video, which is more than a half-hour, shows the multitude of Rams slowly lapping the track, with flags waving in the cold November air. Honking horns was strictly prohibited, and the Rams did not off-road through the Adenauer Forst S-bend's grass. This is also one of the rare Nurburgring videos where no-one crashes into the railings at great speed. The parade was arranged by a vehicle trading company called AutoGlobalTrade, which originally aimed for 1,317 trucks to arrive at the Nurburgring, but the official number is still something to be proud of. The majority of the trucks were German, with some Rams having arrived from neighboring countries. Related Video: News Source: RamWorldRecord via PistonHeadsImage Credit: EMS Nordschleife TV Weird Car News Dodge RAM Truck Videos