Specialty File
Some people's livelihoods require them to drive big pickups. As enthusiasts, however, we've always been mystified by those drivers who choose a truck. It's also a disturbing fact that despite lackluster performance, many of these trucks are piloted by hot dogs who think they're driving sports cars but are in fact weaving in and out of traffic in bone-stock Ford F-150s and Chevy Silverados.
Oh, there have been a few low-volume trucks that perform reasonably well, but currently, neither Ford nor GM comes close to matching Dodge's pair of blazing pickups—regular and Quad Cab versions of the Viper-powered Ram SRT10. We'd have trouble justifying the stratospheric $50,000 stickers on these beasts, but we know there are at least 4500 people happy with the sheer outrageousness of a 500-hp pickup.
But for the truly lunatic truck lover who can't come to terms with the fact that his or her 5000-plus-pound pickup isn't able to outrun Corvettes and Porsche 911s, John Hennessey has a solution. The president of Hennessey Performance Engineering, whose horsepower-crazed cars have graced our pages for years, recently brought his latest toy—an 800-hp version of the Ram SRT10 Quad Cab—to Hogback Road.
Shortly after the SRT version of the Ram went on sale, Hennessey got phone calls from owners familiar with his Viper transformations who wondered what he had available for the truck. The company now sells many upgrades for both regular and Quad Cab models, many originating from the Viper catalog.
The truck shown here has Hennessey's $39,500 Venom 800 Twin Turbo package, very similar to the setup in the Viper that won our November 2004 Supercar Challenge, although this one retains stock internals and 8.3-liter displacement. The goodies include twin Garrett ball-bearing turbos that force 10.0 psi into the V-10 while a front-mounted air-to-air intercooler chills the pressurized air. Hennessey also added a $950 GReddy PRofec B-spec II boost controller to run the twin TiAL waste gates that bleed off excess pressure. The fuel pump, the lines, and the injectors were all super-sized but work with the factory engine-management system to keep up with the extra gasoline requirements to produce the claimed 800 horsepower and 850 pound-feet of torque. That's a stunning 300 more horses and 325 more pound-feet than the factory version.
After we heard those numbers, we weren't surprised that the standard four-speed automatic, the only transmission in the Quad Cab, had to be upgraded. Hennessey adds a $1750 torque converter that resists a big meltdown. And the transmission gets a $5950 tear-down, after which it sports a significantly beefed-up billet input shaft and clutch packs that can hold onto gears long after the turbos spool up. Skeptics, rest assured. Hennessey backs up the $48,150 powertrain creation with a two-year/24,000-mile warranty.
