(engine revving)
- This is the fastest Dodge Demon in the world.
A 1500 horsepower, eight second quarter mile Demon
that has twin turbos?
Not only this Demon ditch its infamous supercharger,
it's got the full carbon fiber body treatment,
and we're not talking about cheap
run of the mill carbon fiber,
we're talking space-grade top tier stuff.
That's right, there's different types of carbon fiber,
and we're gonna talk about it.
Now the engineering behind the stock
wheelie producing Demon was already impressive,
but this one is even better
and today I'm gonna show you why.
So let's jump in and take a look
at the incredible engineering behind the world's
fastest Dodge Demon, AKA Lucifer.
(upbeat music)
Now if you notice that I'm not in a typical
Bumper 2 Bumper studio setting,
well, that's because we're doing our part
here at Donut by not leaving the house.
So we thank you for watching.
The format is going to look a little different,
but we're still going to give you some sweet videos
with some knowledge and lots of chuckles.
Now Dodge dropped their third Gen Challenger
way back in 2008,
and more or less every year since then
they've been releasing upgraded and faster versions
of their Mopar inspired muscle car.
They make a GT, an RT, the Scat Pack.
(imitates drumroll)
(laughing)
Look and they even have an all wheel drive version.
In 2015, they went crazy and released the Hellcat,
a 707 horsepower Challenger, and then in 2018,
they lost their (beep) minds and they built the Demon,
an 840 horsepower street legal freak of a car.
It was the fastest non-electric car
to go to 60 miles per hour from a standstill,
and the fastest to do a quarter mile,
and the first production car to do a friggin' wheelie.
(engine revving)
Dodge had built the most absurd Challenger ever.
That's until SpeedKore came along.
(upbeat music)
Now these guys, now they're in the business
of making super nice carbon fiber parts
and building insane performance vehicles.
They always use the same very complex recipe,
reduce weight, increase horsepower.
You can literally see that those are the two areas,
they focused on when building this car.
Full carbon fiber body and giving the engine more power.
That's the supercharger delete, twin turbo setup.
So those are the two things
I'm gonna focus on today.
Let's begin with the first part of their recipe
and that's reducing weight by using carbon fiber.
(upbeat music)
Everyone knows carbon fiber, it's cool.
Super lightweight, it's strong, it's pretty,
but it's also expensive.
So it's impressive that this car is body panels,
its bumpers, its hood, the roof, the fenders,
the doors, the splitter,
everything is made from carbon fiber.
And by making all those parts out of carbon fiber,
the Demon is 600 pounds lighter than the stock body.
That's a 15% drop in weight from a stock Demon.
Now to put that into context,
your pelvis weighs 15% of your total body weight.
So yeah, imagine losing your pelvis.
(laughs)
You can't see my hips in this shot
so I don't know why I'm moving.
Now there's a general rule of thumb out there
in the drag scene and that's every hundred pounds you drop
you also lose a 10th of your quarter mile time.
That rule of thumb goes away as your car gets faster
but the main principle stays the same,
and that means less weight equals faster times
down the drag strip.
So dropping weight by using carbon fiber
is a go to method for reducing pounds.
But what exactly is carbon fiber?
Now you hear it being thrown around all the time
as this New Age, space-grade material but in fact,
it's been around for a long time.
You may have heard of a guy by the name of Thomas Edison.
Well in 1879, he invented the first incandescent light bulb.
Now, you probably know how light bulb works,
and it's pretty simple right.
You have electricity that heats up a thin strip of material
called the filament, and that filament glows.
Well Edison used cotton threads and bamboo slivers
as the material for his filaments.
After he shaped them into the size that he wanted,
he then baked them, and when you bake those materials,
you're basically carbonizing that material,
meaning you're making a carbon copy of that cotton strand.
He was the first guy to invent carbon fiber.
Now carbon fiber is made up of very thin strands
of the element carbon.
Just a bunch of carbon atoms bonded together
to form a long chain.
Now these long chains, they're extremely stiff,
they're strong and they're light,
and you can take these chains or strands of carbon fiber,
and you can twist them together,
similar to how yarn is made.
You take that yarn and then weave the yarn together
to make a cloth or a sheet,
and this is the raw building material
used to make carbon fiber parts.
Even the way they weave the carbon fiber strands together
can vary to give different looks
and alter its strength properties.
Now this is the front fender off my RC 51, my motorcycle
and it uses a standard checker board pattern.
And you can tell it's checker board because, well,
looks like a friggin' checker board.
So how do you go from taking carbon fiber sheets
to carbon fiber composite parts, like this one.
And that word composite is the second part of the equation
and it's an important one that usually gets left off
when we talk about carbon fiber parts.
We say carbon fiber but what we really mean
is carbon fiber composite.
You see on its own carbon fiber is pretty brittle
and it can break and crack and split fairly easily.
So it's suspended in a glue-like material
called epoxy resin before it's molded
and turned into a part like this one.
Epoxy resin is what turns carbon fiber
into a carbon fiber composite.
Now resin does two things.
First, it holds all the carbon fiber strands together.
And second, the resin adds toughness and durability.
It's slightly plastic in nature which is good
because it helps absorb sharp blows like a crash
without creating any detrimental splits
between the carbon fibers.
So that's carbon fiber.
Great, now what makes SpeedKore's carbon fiber so unique?
Remember when we talked about that epoxy resin
like two seconds ago.
Well there's a few ways you can apply that resin.
You can use it in the wet variety
and pour the epoxy into the mold on top of the fiber.
You then vacuum seal it and it forces,
all of the resin into the fibers, and then you let it cure.
When it's done, it comes out of the mold
with a shiny appearance kind of like this.
Now, the more time-intensive
and more strictly controlled way of applying the resin
is of course what SpeedKore does.
And that's using a process called dry
or prepreg carbon fiber,
and instead of coating the carbon fiber cloth
by pouring resin over it,
dry carbon fiber has the resin coated on the fiber weave.
Each strand has the appropriate amount of epoxy
while it's being made.
Its pre-impregnated.
Now the ratio of fiber to resin
is controlled throughout the entire sheet.
The prepreg carbon fiber is then molded
and placed into an autoclave where it's cured.
So an autoclave, it's just a pressurized oven
kind of like a pressure cooker.
They use this because putting the part
under high pressure and high heat
fixes any irregularities the part may have.
Now because with prepreg, you control the amount of resin,
it weighs about 70% less than a wet carbon fiber part,
coming from the same mold.
So now the wet process, even when it's vacuum sealed,
ends up with an excess amount of resin
and that extra resin is extra weight.
On the other hand, it costs a lot more
to make parts with prepreg.
When you go on FleaBay and look at carbon fiber parts
coming from China, 99% of the time
they're gonna be of the wet variety.
And even then, the resin is just painted on
and not even vacuum sealed.
They just freakin' slap resin on there,
heat it up and cure it and that's it.
Not a lot of quality control there.
They also cheap out by using only a single layer
of carbon fiber, and then backing it with fiberglass.
My fender on my RC 51, that's what they did.
And I know that because I can look inside the part
ad I can see the fiberglass, it's opaque,
so you can literally see light
pass through the carbon fiber.
And they try to hide it by spraying this section black,
but I'm no dummy.
And now you're not a dummy 'cause now you're gonna know
someone sends you a fake carbon fiber part,
this is a good way to check.
Hold up to the light, you see light through it
that they try to paint and hide it.
If they did, they're a bunch of (beep).
Okay I went off script a lot there, I'm sorry.
(laughs)
But SpeedKore, they didn't skimp out,
they use the best of the best when building their Demon.
It takes about 200 hours to make an entire body panel
swap for the Demon.
Every piece is handmade right here
in the good old USA.
And by taking every panel, fender and bumper
and replacing it with their own carbon fiber piece,
it drops, another 600 pounds off the car.
Now if you're curious how they got
every single proportion right
so the kit doesn't look like Lokar, no offense to Lokar,
love you Nolan.
Dodge gave SpeedKore their CAD drawings,
which allowed them to tool their machines
so that each piece is identical
and the shape of the factory piece, pretty neat.
But there's actually one piece on this car,
that's a little different.
And that is the front bumper.
And why is it different?
Well because we got twin turbo baby,
and that's the second part of the SpeedKore recipe,
increase power.
Now like I mentioned before, the regular old Demon
gets you 840 horsepower for the 6.2 liter supercharged hemi.
Just a supercharger itself is 2.7 liters.
Now, that number is separate from the engine displacement.
It's the volume of air that the supercharger
can cram into those cylinders, each time,
there's a 360 rotation of the supercharger.
You get 2.7 liters per rev, that is a ton of air.
Dodge even designed the grabber hood
to help feed that supercharger even further.
It's a biggest scooping inlet on any production car
in America, and a stock Demon, it needs all that air.
In a quarter mile sprint, the Demon supercharged V eight
sucks in 173 cubic feet of air.
That's the equivalent of the lung capacity
of 816 humans.
816 of y'all just go (inhales deeply).
That's how much air it sucks in, that's a lot.
(exhales loudly)
But why would they ditch, their tried and true
factory supercharger set up for some turbs,
especially because superchargers and turbochargers
essentially do the same thing,
they just go about it in a different way.
Both are forced induction systems,
meaning they literally force air into your engine.
The more air you can get into the cylinders,
the more power you'll make.
The difference between the two is that a supercharger
will take its power from the crankshaft
meaning you're making the engine work to spin the wheels
as well as the supercharger sitting on top of it,
and that's the biggest disadvantage of a supercharger,
they actually steal some horsepower from the engine.
Because the crank shaft drives the supercharger
as much as 20% of the engines total power
can be lost to spinning the superchargers pulley.
It's called parasitic loss.
But there's a trade off.
You get close to 50% more horsepower,
with the supercharger and that's why people use them.
Turbochargers, on the other hand, they're more efficient.
You see your engine, it's already pumping out exhaust gases,
when it's running and a turbo freakin' loves exhaust gases,
it's a Dutch oven lover.
And that's what makes a turbo such a beautiful
engineering design.
As your car produces exhaust, that exhaust
gets sent to the turbo where it drives a turbine.
That turbine spins, and then drives a compressor,
which is just a fancy word for an air pump
and all that new fresh air from the air pump
is then sent into the engine.
More air means more power.
So the SpeedKore team did the unthinkable,
they took the tried and true beloved Demon supercharger
and they ditched it.
But they a had a good reason really.
By doing the swap they gained nearly 660 horsepower.
And with a turbo you don't need to lose power to gain power,
like a supercharger does.
Turbos are also easier on the engine altogether.
Now, could you get a supercharger
to give you that much horsepower?
Maybe, probably.
There are some thousand horsepower supercharged
Demons out there, but they don't sound like this.
(engine revving)
Speaking of Boost Creeps we got a new boost creeps t-shirt.
Go to donutmedia.com, get yours, there pretty cool.
SpeedKore team went with two billet twin turbo chargers,
and then they routed them right in the front bumper.
If there ever was a factory twin turbo Demon,
this is what it should look like, it's super trick.
They even put an oil cooler in here,
a custom exhaust, bigger injectors
and a triple fuel pump system.
When you add more air, you have to add more fuel.
And now the intake is a custom piece built
by SpeedKore as well to made up to the turbos,
and they even retain the use of the factory intercooler.
Not only that, they use the factory power chiller
'cause it's chill as (beep).
The Demon comes from the factory with the ability
to use the AC to cool down the fluid
entering the intercooler even further.
They call it the power chiller.
And when it's on, you lose the ability to control the AC
in the cabin, but Hey, that fluid
that's going into the intercooler is much more important,
so screw your passengers.
Now SpeedKore team tapped into that system
keeping it like it is from the factory, that's pretty cool.
Just a quick point you may have seen some articles out there
listing this car with various horsepower numbers.
However, I need to point something out, in particular,
and when we talk about horsepower,
it's important to know what kind of horsepower
we're talking about.
Yep, there's different kinds of horsepower.
Now, horsepower is referring to either wheel horsepower,
or crank horsepower.
And what's the difference?
Well, crank horsepower is measured at the crank, obviously.
That means they hook the engine up to a dyno.
And a dyno is just a device used to measure force,
and then horsepower is calculated
from that force measurement.
Now in this case, all the engine powered accessories
like the AC compressor, the power steering,
the alternator, and sometimes even the water pump,
are removed from the engine during the test.
Now wheel horsepower on the other hand,
they have all those bits, still attached,
and you guessed it, the car's wheels are driving the dyno.
So, what does all that mean?
Well, it means that crank horsepower
will always be higher than wheel horsepower
for a given car-engine combo.
The drive train can't be 100% efficient
in transferring power from the crank to the wheels.
You got to go from the crank shaft to the engine
to the trans to the drive shaft to the diff to the axles
to the wheels, and that's a long route
that power has to travel
and you lose some ponies throughout all that handoff,
about 15 to 20%.
So crank horsepower are sometimes called BHP,
which stands for brake horsepower is cool,
but it's wheel horsepower that's a more real number
since it's the actual amount of power going to the wheels.
So this Demon has 1500 wheel horsepower, 1800 at the crank.
Again, that is absurd, for a street legal car.
If I had 1500 horsepower at my disposal.
Think about 1500 horses.
You're gonna need like six acres at least.
(laughs) You'd have more than that.
I think is an acre a horse, I believe that's the rule.
You gotta have one acre per horse.
So that means you need at least 1500 acres.
(laughing)
So this right here is the second version of this car,
and this is the third version of this car.
Now version two of this car ran in eight-six
in the quarter mile about a year ago.
And what's even more impressive,
is it did so on stock internals and the stock transmission.
It just goes to show you how good the Demon
is from the factory.
Now because it's supercharged, Dodge engineered heavy-duty
components that could handle the added strain on the engine
from the added boost, but being the speed freaks
that they are, SpeedKore wanted more.
So in version three, they swapped in a new Demon motor
but this time they upgraded the rods, the pistons
in a new camshaft.
It still has the same displacement,
with the same stock-style block.
And speaking of stock, the interior is the same
as a regular old Demon.
It still has AC.
It still has a stereo, Bluetooth, the Nav.
They even left the spare tire in it,
an eight second car with a spare tire in the back,
that is freaking cool.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode
of "Bumper 2 Bumper."
We're gonna be focusing on some more engineering aspects
of cars.
You got an interesting car out there
that you want to know more of the engineering aspects
behind it, DM me on Instagram at Jeremiah Burton,
we'll see if we can get it on the show.
Hit us up at Donut, @DonutMedia.
Click, Like, subscribe, thank you guys so much for watching.
Bye for now.
(electronic music)
(engine revving)