Tim Kuniskis was interviewed by Hot Rod magazine about the new Challenger SRT Super Stock. Here are some quotes from the interview: "If I had to categorize it, I would say the Super Stock is nothing like the Demon, and it's more like the Redeye, just re-tuned for the wheel and tire package. The spring rates are totally different than Demon. The Demon has much smaller and even hollow sway bars. We didn't do any of that on [Super Stock]. The whole intent here was to get an 18-inch wheel on the car. You can say it splits the difference between Demon and Redeye, but I'd say it's more like 80/20: 80 percent toward Redeye and 20 percent toward Demon. We had a little bit more time [to develop the 807 hp rating on the Super Stock], a little bit more real-world durability testing; you know, because the Redeye engine, just like the Demon engine, has a different valvetrain in it than the Hellcat, so we knew it had a little bit more rpm capability in it. Nobody ever saw Super Stock coming. For the people who are into it, it's significant. Ever since we launched the Redeye, there's been one thing that's bothered us about the car. Yes, it has amazing horsepower. The other thing, it has is a ton of torque. And even with the 305 Pirellis with the Widebody kit, it just was traction-limited. There's just no way around it. Because we didn't build the Demon anymore, we didn't want to lose our claim as having the quickest, fastest, most powerful muscle car in the industry. And that traction was holding us back from making that claim, so we needed to do that. We needed to do two things: We needed to put traction back in the car so that we could re-establish that. We could run a stock trim 10.50 second in the quarter-mile and reclaim that lead. The second thing we needed to do was, we know that our hardcore enthusiasts that actually go to the track, they want more tire than was there with a 305 Pirelli on a regular Redeye. The challenge is, they could go to a drag radial on a 20-inch wheel, but they couldn't go any smaller than that because of the size of the brakes on the Redeye package. So, to go to a smaller wheel and tire to get more sidewall, to get more traction, they had to go to a much smaller brake package. "We were toying with should we go down that space, should we build the car like everyone else, should we go to a smaller, lighter platform, which we will have to eventually, but at that time, we went to our customers and we surveyed them on road courses, drag racing, just regular cruising, what kind of stuff were they interested in. So what we found out was, it was a 7-to-1-ratio of people that said they identified with drag racing over road course. You made the comment about the Demon [horsepower at 808 versus 807 for Super Stock], I always try to be very clear with this because I tell people we wouldn't build another Demon, and we did Super Stock, and they say 'Oh, isn't this Demon Lite?' I say absolutely not, and you understand it. When we did the Demon, we rated the car on race gas, and we rated it on pump gas, and it was 808 versus 807 [hp]. You saw it and you know that—kind of with a wink—yeah, that's one horsepower less. Sure it is. And there's more to it than that because when we had the hero run—the 9.65—sure, it was a prepped track, it was great conditions and all those things. And at first, nobody could duplicate those times." https://www.hotrod.com/articles/2020-dodge-srt-challenger-super-stock-tim-kuniskis-interview/ Note: The MSRP of the Super Stock is $81,090.
