Truth be told, sports cars – just like many other passenger car segments – are not doing great these days. They are not almost extinct like minivans, for example, but they are also not selling as great as automotive enthusiasts might think. Instead, the crossover, SUV, and truck craze is slowly but steadily eroding their sales. Oh, and not to mention, the EV revolution is almost upon them, as well.
As such, is anyone surprised that Blue Oval’s 2024 Ford Mustang alone is keeping the ICE and two-door banner up while its rivals are slowly dying or morphing into something else around it? Dodge’s Charger and Challenger are soon going to ‘enjoy’ a sustainable Banshee EV lifestyle after the ICE-powered 2023 model year versions cease production, and there is nothing fans can do to save the supercharged Hemi V8.
They may not even want to, given the teased nine levels of Banshee EV powertrains, but that is a completely different discussion. Meanwhile, over at camp GM, rumors claim the Detroit maker is ready to morph the Corvette and Camaro nameplates (along with the Caddy Escalade luxury SUV) into veritable sub-brands. However, no one knows how long they will enjoy the two-door lifestyle past the rumor mill’s 2025 threshold for the transformations.
Luckily, there is still a little bit of time to enjoy some of these ICE beasts, at least as far as the local dragstrips are concerned. So, cue to the videographer behind the Wheels channel on YouTube, who is a big fan of the MRP and Bandimere dragstrips, and now gives us interesting Muscle vs. Sports car brawls. The food for quarter-mile thought was uploaded on December 22nd and includes a series of six Corvette versus Dodge Challenger and Charger skirmishes filmed at Mission Raceway Park (British Columbia, Canada) and Bandimere Speedway (also known as Thunder Mountain, Colorado).
The first trio of races is of a classic two-door nature. So, a trifecta of Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcats dukes it out with a couple of C7 Chevy Corvette Z06 sports cars and a C7 Stingray (in between them, at the 1:09 mark). Well, GM enthusiasts might want to look away from these brawls, as there was nothing the Corvette drivers did that sufficed to win the skirmishes.
An interesting change of pace then occurs at the 2:38 mark when a crimson C8 Chevy Corvette Stingray was set against a mean green Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat Redeye. Oddly enough, it was not the quickest or fastest such encounter we have ever seen, given the 12.43s (Charger) versus 12.77s (C8) ETs, mild trap speeds of 119 mph (192 kph) and 116 mph (187 kph), respectively, plus the rather slow start. In the end, the last two skirmishes were only there to defend Chevy’s honor, probably.
Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution. Full profile
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