The Dodge Viper has been absent for just one model year, but the natives are restless. With little concrete information out there about the next generation Viper, and Dodge officials remaining tight-lipped about their halo car, anything that surfaces is big news. So how about this for the biggest news yet: Chrysler’s SRT Brand President and CEO Ralph Gilles has announced in the pages of Viper magazine that the 2013 Viper will be introduced at the New York Auto Show in early April.
So what might we expect to learn in the next four months? The biggest question is what kind of power the snake will be packing under its unnaturally long hood. Anything other than a V10 would be heresy, so Chrysler will likely bump the Viper’s displacement up to 8.7 liters, trumping every other Mopar mill to ever roll out of an engine plant.
The other canard is that the Viper will be based on a sports car from the Fiat stable, like the Alfa Romeo 8C or Maserati GranTurismo. (One rumor even had the new Viper incorporating some sort of Ferrari-derived technology.) Some of this conjecture may prove to be true in the end, but we hardly imagine that the Viper that gets unveiled in New York will be badge-engineered from anything European. Although it will most certainly add a further layer of refinement to the car, Chrysler would be crazy to dilute the Viper’s American muscle car spirit.
autoblog
