Having cobbled together a psychotic supercharged golem to drop between the fenders of the Dodge Challenger and Charger, SRT needed a name. They found it in “Hellcat,” a moniker that had previously graced the WW II-era Grumman F6F, a stubby, radial-powered thing that could finally take the fight to Mitsubishi’s excellent Zero, the pre-eminent carrier-based fighter of the first part of the war. But given Chrysler’s history with cartoon bees and demons and whatnot, the car obviously needed a mascot.
-Above, we have a number of sketches that led to the final, roaring feline head. The one on the upper right could almost come from the days of Air Grabber hoods and “beep-beep” horns, a throwback to the original Super Bee and Road Runner era. The lower left depicts some manner of catlike hellbeast in an impossibly low crouch, undoubtedly prepared to rip the throat out of a passing Mustang. In the middle, an angry, shrieking thing resembles the logo Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong chose for his Hellcat Records label, which led to a bunch of excited intra-office messaging, inserting 707-horsepower Dodges into the lyrics of his former band, Operation Ivy—a group named for a mid-century military happening in the Pacific. Ivy was the series of tests that included the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb at Eniwetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
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- How SRT Validated the 204-mph Top Speed of the Charger Hellcat
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- Dodge Charger SRT/SRT Hellcat Full Coverage: News, Photos, Specs, Reviews, and More
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Speaking to Automotive News, Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis notes that the mascot wasn’t originally scheduled to grace the front fender of the cars. “If you look at the cars that we had at the first press event, they didn’t have the logo on them. That was a very last-minute change all driven by feedback on social media.” In fact, the early Challenger Hellcat Dodge supplied us for last year’s 10Best evaluation merely carried a “SUPERCHARGED” emblem. Perhaps they should send over another one. You know, just so we can subject the emblem to further scrutiny.
-from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1ExIogG
via Agya
