Charger Hellcat vs Supercharged Corvette Drag Race Explains The Racer's Fallacy

Oh, and we must also mention that the shenanigan took place in Mexico - given the much less difficult police interactions across the border, taking the battle to Mexico has become a common practice for those who have the possibility to relocate their races.

We have to explain that while the Mopar machine came in stock form, the C6 Gran Sport we have here had been gifted with a supercharger. And this is the point where things get interesting as we're dealing with an exemplification of the racer's fallacy (this is a little thing we came up with in the office).

In order to explain this, we'll have to start by mentioning the gambler's fallacy. This is an erroneus belief telling us that, if a certain event occurs more often than normal over a certain period, it will take place less frequently in the future.

For instance, imagine you have ten consecutive die throws and the goal is to grab as many "1s" as possible. One could imagine that, with each throw that isn't a "1", the odds of hitting the target increase, as if the universe would have some sort of magical memory aimed at balancing things. In reality, the odds decrease, since there are less throws remaining.

Note that the gambler's fallacy doesn't apply to events that are interconnected, such as pulling cards out of a deck. For instance, if an ace is removed from a complete deck, the chances of the next card to also be an ace are smaller than in the case of other cards, simply because there are four cards of each rank left, but only three aces.

So, what does this have to do with racing? Well, the similarity is a bit of a stretch, but, in our book, it still stands - you see, when treated with a race such as the one we have here, many aficionados, including some here in our office, expect the tuner car to be the clear winner.

And that's because they presume that anybody boosting their naturally aspirated speed demon would make it faster than a hypothetical benchmark. In real life, though, people don't dyno tune their blown Corvettes until they can beat Hellcats, even though a few of them might do this.

Er... no, this doesn't mean the 707 hp Charger is the clear winner either, as you'll be able to find out from the piece of footage below.