We've now made some baseline runs on the dragstrip, to see what this big black beauty can do on an ideal surface (i.e. no potholes/frost heaves/idiot drivers on cellphones).
We took it up to Gainesville Raceway, on a day when some of the other car magazines that share our Tampa office brought some of their projects out for a test-and-tune day.
On the first run, I skipped the burnout (though the traction control was switched off), and mashed the throttle from idle after staging. Result: a 15.13-second ET at around 93 miles an hour.
(The ET slip had this to say about my reaction time: "We used a calendar to time it." )
After a cool-down time (where the other guys made multiple runs with their cars), it was time to hammer on the brain bucket, climb back in the Charger, and make another run.
This time, after it was staged (again, skipping the burnout), I brake-torqued it, and the Charger leaped forward when the light went green. It kept pulling all the way down the strip...to a 14.73-second ET, with the speed near 95 mph. (And no sarcastic comments on the ET slip about my reaction time, this time).
That's pretty close to the mid-14s that I've heard the '06-'07 Chargers can run in the 1/4-mile ("They can run them all day," I heard one Charger Police owner say at the Mopar Nats a couple years ago.)
That's with no modifications other than taking the wheel covers off. With a better (and lighter) driver, that 14.73-second time might improve by at lest a couple of tenths.All runs were made on a typically hot/muggy July day in Florida--i.e. the humidity was so thick, you could cut it with a knife & serve it for dinner.
On the way home, not long after getting on I-75 to head home, a guy in an Arrest-Me Red "sport sedan" gave his brakes a major workout when he saw me appear in his rear-view mirror. He kept at the posted speed limit (with me trailing him, about five seconds behind) until he turned onto Florida's Turnpike, just south of Ocala.
He would have been wise to keep at the posted limit there, as the Florida Highway Patrol has more than a few of their Hemi-powered Chargers on patrol along the Turnpike.