(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)
