Rallycross takes competition rally cars, adds a ton of power, and puts them in wheel-to-wheel racing. It is a videogame come to life. Thus we're excited to see SRT Motorsport's new 600-horsepower, four-wheel-drive rallycross Dodge Dart in the flesh and with Travis Pastrana at the wheel.
We're going to run down the specs on this prototype, because it reads like a laundry list of everything we want in a compact car.
In the Dodge Dart road car, the 2.0-liter, four-cylinder, 16-valve, turbocharged engine produces 184 horsepower and 184 lb-ft of torque. Pastrana's rallycross car is rated at 600 horsepower and 550 ft-lbs of torque.
While the road car is front-wheel-drive, the rallycross version gets Sadev four-wheel-drive. And that's definitely a sequential gearbox that Pastrana gets to handle. Dodge quotes the zero-to-sixty time at 1.9 seconds. Suck on that Bugatti.
The wheel man, Pastrana, is a four-time Rally America Champion and he has 17 X Games gold medals to his name.
He's followed like mad all over the internet, so people may actually start caring about the 2012 Global RallyCross Championship (GRC) Series, where this Dart will be going up against, amongst other things, race-prepped Ford Fiestas.
Rallycross circuits are half-dirt, half-pavement, with massive quantities of oversteer built in to each turn. The season opener is on May 26th, and ESPN will cover the whole series live, all the way until it comes to a close in September.
As you can see in this video of Pastrana starting testing, the car is insane. It pulls four-wheel-drifts for days, and it doesn't care if it's on dirt or on tarmac.
We're big fans of rallycross, and we're big fans of American car manufacturers facing off in racing that involves regularly turning both left and right.
Now it looks like the two are coming together and we're pretty excited.
(Hat tip to McNewbie1!)